Friday, November 30, 2007

Homosexuality

The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals.  That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals.  It's just that they need more supervision.

Lynn Lavner

Homosexuality is god's way of insuring that the truly gifted aren't burdened with children. 

Sam Austin

If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work:  "Hello.  Can't work today, still queer."

Robin Tyler

War.  Rape.  Murder.  Poverty.  Equal rights for gays.  Guess which one the Southern Baptist Convention is protesting?

The Value of Families

Everybody's journey is individual.  If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy.  The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

James Baldwin

Why can't they have gay people in the army?  Personally, I think they are just afraid of a thousand guys with M16s going, "Who'd you call a faggot?"

John Stewart

The one bonus of not lifting the ban on gays in the military is that the next time the government mandates a draft we can all declare homosexuality instead of running off to Canada.

Lorne Bloch

We struggled against apartheid because we were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about. It is the same with homosexuality. The orientation is a given, not a matter of choice. It would be crazy for someone to choose to be gay, given the homophobia that is present

Desmond Tutu

[homosexuals are] brute beasts... part of a vile and satanic system [that] will be utterly annihilated, and there will be a celebration in heaven

Jerry Falwell

...the homosexual conduct of a parent — conduct involving a sexual relationship between two persons of the same gender — creates a strong presumption of unfitness that alone is sufficient justification for denying that parent custody of his or her own children or prohibiting the adoption of the children of others.... Homosexual conduct is, and has been, considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated. Such conduct violates both the criminal and civil laws of this State and is destructive to a basic building block of society — the family....It is an inherent evil against which children must be protected.

Chief Justice Moore, Alabama

Gay people, well, gay people are evil, evil right down to their cold black hearts which pump not blood like yours or mine, but rather a thick, vomitous oil that oozes through their rotten veins and clots in their pea-sized brains which becomes the cause of their Nazi-esque patterns of violent behavior. Do you understand?

South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone

If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nailbiters.

Anita Bryant

The promotion of homosexuality would lead to the eventual destruction of the human race.

Lech Kaczynski

Concerning the Pope's claim that homosexuality is 'unnatural'. Perhaps the Pope is suggesting that it lies beyond the scope of 'normal' human behavior. If so, this has uncomfortable implications for an association of old men who wear dresses, hear voices and practice ritual cannibalism. Self-enforced celibacy is all but unknown among other animal species. If any sexual behavior is out of tune with the natural world, it is surely that of the priesthood.

George Monbiot

None of the Gospel writers, nor the missionary Paul, nor the formulators of the Tradition, possess the psychological, sociological, and sexological knowledge which now inform our theological reflections about human sexuality. They knew nothing of sexual orientation or of the natural heterosexual-bisexual-homosexual continuum that exists in human life. They did not postulate that persons engaging in same-gender sex acts could have been expressing their natural sexuality. They presumed that persons engaged in same-gender acts were heterosexual, presumed only one purpose for for sexuality (procreation) and presumed that anyone engaged in same-gender sex acts was consciously choosing perversion of what was assumed to be natural sexuality (i.e., heterosexuality). We now know that same-gender sex acts have been observed in a multitude of species from sea gulls to porcupines... We know that same-gender oriented persons can experience deep love with one another and can nurture meaningful, long-lasting relationships.

William R. Johnson

Nobody knows what "causes" homosexuality any more than they know what "causes" heterosexuality. (Of course, there is far less interest in what causes the latter.) Overtly, the old psychoanalytic bugaboos are dead; there is no evidence, according to the Kinsey Institute, that male homosexuality is caused by dominant mothers and/or weak fathers, or that female homosexuality is caused by girls' having exclusively male role models. Furthermore, children who are raised by gay and lesbian couples are no more likely to be homosexual than children of heterosexual couples. Nor do people become adult homosexuals because they were seduced by older people or went to same-sex boarding schools...
Though the causes of sexual orientation are unknown and the definitions fluid, the likelihood of converting a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation, or vice versa, is very slight. Some homosexual men and women voluntarily come for therapy to change from same-sex to opposite-sex partners, but it is not clear whether the limited "success" rate refers to a change in their feelings and the pattern of their desire, or just in their ability to consciously restrict their sexual contact to members of the opposite sex.

Patricia Hersch

Even though adult homosexuals have fought hard to win rights and liberties... too many people are still scandalized by the mere idea that youth discovering their gay orientation could be given the same liberties and possibilities as straight ones. Whereas the discovery of heterosexual desire is celebrated as the sign that "he's becoming a man" and therefore largely encouraged, without anyone seeing any sort of proselytizing in it, it's a completely different story when it's homosexual desire that's surfacing. Everything happens as if gays and bisexuals under 18 didn't exist, or at least shouldn't exist.

Dr. Michel Dorais

Gays are not oppressed on a whim, but because of the specific need of capitalism for the nuclear family. The nuclear family, as the primary — and inexpensive — provider and carer for the workforce, fulfilled in the nineteenth century and still fulfills an important need for capitalism. Alternative sexualities represent a threat to the family model because they provide an alternative role model for people. Gays are going to be in the front line of attack whenever capitalism wants to reinforce family values.

Louise Tierney

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity:  monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine.  The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man:  members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

Thomas Szasz

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

A plausible gay agenda?

After Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby accused the Anglican and Catholic archbishops of Sydney, Peter Jensen and George Pell, of making it hard for people to adopt a more tolerant attitude to gays, adding that homophobia and gay-bashing attitudes could come "from people's religious upbringing, reinforced even to this day by religious instruction, and it has to be said, religious instruction from the two archbishops of Sydney", one tends to review these statements on the light of the many news on homophobia worldwide, and at least me, conclude that the best gay agenda to be, if ever one, would surely be that of putting an end to every sort of religion in the world.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Donde dije digo... Poland's Prime Minister U-Turn

Not that strange in a country more catholic than the Pope. Where Donald Tusk said formerly that in case of being elected Prime Minister Poland would sign the European Union Rights Chart, he meant that things would remain the same or worse. So, children, learn how to play with politicians: first have your rights signed in a law, then vote for them. Rudyard Kipling put it much better in his book Kim:  "Trust a Brahmin before a snake, and a snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan", and a Pathan before a politician, and a politician before Donald Tusk, I would add. With no disrespect for brahmins, snakes, harlots and Pathans, of course. Nuff said.

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Bajans are going mad

"Darcy Dear was the victim of a recent stone-throwing incident that left two windows in the upper level of his home broken", reports The Nation. I'm probably not the right person to state whether this has been a hate crime or just vandalism, and there are Party for the Rights editors who would, more appropriately than me, tell us about the Darcy Dear story, its implications, and with a little push of readers, maybe even describe first hand what a Bajan has to face if (s)he comes out of the closet. But it was Trinidad which wanted to stop Elton John from going to the island for fear that he could inoculate homosexuality, one or two years ago. Fellow Bajans, correct my wrongs.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Christian Double rule and Bias - More proof

Via The Age dot com, here's the latest proof that American Christians (and by extension Christians in general, and probably most religious clerks, priests, pastors,  bishops and hierarchy at large) use the principle of Freedom of Speech in their own and exclusive benefit: in other words, there must be freedom for them to speak but all other voices must remain silent:

Christian bookshops are refusing to stock copies of a new Bible study guide that challenges standard New Testament translations that describe gay sex as sinful.

A US distributor, God's Word to Women, has banned the Australian publication, and withdrawn another Bible translation published by the same NSW publishing house, Smith and Stirling, for promoting a lifestyle in contradiction of the scriptures.

Two American academics have asked that their endorsements be removed from other works by a classical Greek lexicographer, Ann Nyland, because of her authorship of the gay study Bible.

Australia's largest Christian retailer, Koorong, said it was unlikely to carry the Study New Testament for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgender if the content proves controversial.

"If the content proves controversial", that's the key. Controversial, not wrong or false. Just a little controversy and they shut you up. And they still are not ashamed to call themselves Christians. Not to mention that most of those "I have seen the light" preachers would claim to be more classical Greek savvy than any lexicographer or philologist, eh? Speaking in tongues, I think they call it.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Uganda definitely anti-homosexual, government officials state

In another bigoted move, Anglican bishops restarted the issue against homosexuality during a preparatory meeting to the Commonwealth summit in Uganda. AllAfrica dot com reports a heavy exchange of words between bishop (yet another bishop), ahem... "Assistant Bishop of Kampala Church of Uganda Diocese, Zac Niringiye" and a Canadian gay attendant to the summit. Other online sources like New Vision Online say the "ETHICS minister James Nsaba Buturo has dismissed the recommendations of the Commonwealth People’s Forum on gay and lesbian rights."

But Pink News comes with more worrying descriptions about what can be only described as a gay-hunt in Uganda, and by means of Anglican dioceses, in Anglican Africa, with the only probable exceptions of dioceses run by Trevor Mwamba and Desmond Tutu (who recently "slammed" the Anglican church for "being obsessed with homosexuality" in an interview to BBC). On Pink News report:

A group of anti-gay activists has protested in Uganda against gay rights and accused Europeans of trying to change the law to decriminalise homosexuality.
The demonstration by the Rainbow Coalition against Homosexuality took place at Kololo airport yesterday, and was led by Pastor Martin Sempa, who has generated large amounts of publicity through his attacks on gay people in Uganda.

Sempa, or Ssempa, is an old foe of homosexuals, well known by our fellow blogger in the GayUganda blog, where you'll surely find additional first-hand information about these and other issues.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Azis and The Muscle Bears: The Videoclip

From a little browsing on the Internet one comes up with surprises as this one. Maybe this is not really your style of music but you can still watch the clip. And I'm not sorry at all for posting in Party for the Rights, there's no dick and ass, no explicit sex... all left to your imagination.

 

And now a bit of background information on Azis. From its Fan Club at GayRomeo:

Azis was born as Vasil Troyanov Boyanov on March 7th 1978. He is a Bulgarian Romani chalga singer (pop-folk / turbofolk) known for - among other things - his atypical sexual / transgender expression and his flamboyant persona.
Azis performed at the Eurovision Song Contest 2006 for Bulgaria with the song "Let Me Cry" alongside Mariana Popova.
His discography includes: "Celuvai Me" (2003), "Na Golo" (2003), "Kraliat" (2004), "Together" with Desi Slava (2004), and "2005" (2005). Azis has recorded and performed many songs with some of the most popular Bulgarian pop-folk singers, like Desislava, Gloria, Malina, Sofi Marinova, Toni Storaro, the Serbian singer Marta Savic and also the rap performer Ustata.
He began his political career in 2005 as a member of the EuroRoma political party and ran in the general elections campaign in the summer of 2005.
On October 1st 2006, Azis married his husband Niki Kitaetsa. Still their marriage is not legally recognized given the laws of Bulgaria.
In the 2006 TV programme "Velikite Balgari" (the Bulgarian version of the 2002 Greatest Britons from BBC), Azis was elected as the 21st greatest Bulgarian of all time (and was in fact the second ranking living person on the list, after football player Hristo Stoichkov, who was 12th).
Azis appeared on the VIP Brother 2 version of Big Brother Bulgaria alongside his husband Niki Kitaetsa. Azis left the house voluntarily after nineteen days.
On 05 August 2007 Azis became a father. His newborn daughter is named Raya. Raya was conceived via artificial insemination; the baby's mother is Azis' life-long friend Gala.

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The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male

At the Museum of Hoaxes there's a section called "The 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time" which includes the one giving title to this entry, ranked at number 4:

In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)
In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual.
Heath referred to his homosexual subject as patient B-19. He inserted Teflon-insulated electrodes into the septal region of B-19's brain and then gave B-19 carefully controlled amounts of stimulation in experimental sessions. Soon the young man was reporting increased stirrings of sexual motivation. Heath then rigged up a device to allow B-19 to self-stimulate himself. It was like letting a chocoholic loose in a candy shop. B-19 quickly became obsessed with the pleasure button. In one three-hour session he pressed it 1500 times until, as Heath noted, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected."
By this stage of the experiment B-19's libido was so jacked up that Heath decided to proceed with the final stage in which B-19 would be introduced to a sexually-willing female partner. With permission from the state attorney general, Heath arranged for a twenty-one-year-old female prostitute to visit the lab, and he placed her in a room with B-19. For an hour B-19 did nothing, but then the prostitute took the initiative and a successful sexual encounter between the two occurred. Heath considered this a positive result.
Little is known of B-19's later fate. Heath reported that the young man drifted back into a life of homosexual prostitution, but that he also had an affair with a married woman. Heath optimistically decided that this showed the treatment was at least partially successful. However, Heath never did try to convert any more homosexuals.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Tonsils and Homosexuality, a fascinating neuroscience issue

The Spanish political blogosphere is a bit revolted today especially on the leftist side because some woman named Cristina Lopez Schlichting pointed out on her radio space that "homosexuality can be cured". Nothing more, nothing less, this Spanish Ann Coulter wannabe has simply voiced in Spanish what many others have been doing in the USA for years.  Nacho Escolar links Dos Manzanas about the issue in a simple single sentence which says more or less: "Cristina Lopez Schlichting's got the answer (to the question: How to cure homosexuality). Neuroscience is back".

The most interesting part of Escolar post is not on Cristina, but on the Neuroscience side, which links to the transcription of a short interview aired by COPE radio station in 2005 during a demonstration by Family Forum (yes, even in the names Spaniard neocons copy Americans), originally published in Microsiervos. Among some other pearls, the woman interviewed stated her capabilities to give an opinion on homosexuality by saying that back when she was studying psychology, on the subject of Neuroscience there were texts making clear that "when animals have a gland injured, called tonsil, they develop homosexual tendencies, which are of course unnatural because when the seminal fluid enters the anus it can't procreate because all it finds is poopoo" — a more or less bad translation of her point against homosexuality (apart of her 8 children of course, and her blatant bigoted ultracatholicism that she failed to mention). For those of you understanding Spanish, don't miss the original links.

GayMart... Not so.

Via Pink News: "Wal-Mart, the biggest private employer in the US has been given a "do not buy" rating in a new gay consumer guide. Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay rights group in America, made its announcement, in time for the festive season, due to the company's refusal to give domestic partner benefits to gay and lesbian workers."

Well, I've been browsing the Wal-Mart web site because of the prices and just looking for Classic Hanes boxer briefs (y'all know which I mean) but now I think I'll resort to buying online from Freshpair (Blog post not sponsored, readers, I get paid from the Spanish Post Office only).

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Hate crimes raising up in the USA.

USA Today: "Hate crimes in the USA increased 8% in 2006, but some groups, including gays, Muslims and people with mental disabilities, experienced larger spikes in attacks, the FBI says."

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Monday, November 19, 2007

What the Bible says...

Tennessean dot com features on their online issue of yesterday an article on how scholars make their biblical exegesis to confirm existing prejudice, in most cases. With opinions from the maker of success documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, and other renowned people, the title is itself a deep questioning on the reasons and challenges that Biblical scholars meet or don't meet, most of the time: Does the Bible always tell us so?

The article reminds us how through the centuries, the Bible has been used to justify abhorrent crimes such as slavery, while keeping its focus on same sex relationships, and confronting true exegesis, which "involves the careful examination of Scripture in its historical context to understand what it means and how it might speak to us today," versus prooftexting, which occurs when someone takes a Biblical verse out of any context and misusing it to support prejudice and bigotry.

For all this, Does the Bible always tells us so? is something we recommend to read. Not only we recommend it to our fellow homosexuals, but also to Fred Phelps, Akinola, and all the rest.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Fiat Lux Fiat Windows

Via Pink News we learn that Rev. Ken Hutcherson, head of the Antioch Bible Church based in Redmond has launched a plan to "take over Microsoft, one of the world's largest companies by packing it with shareholders who will vote against their policy of advocating gay rights." Reverend Hutcherson "told a shareholders' meeting that he would be the company's "worst nightmare", threatening that he has the support of not only the 3,500 members of his church, but perhaps also millions of evangelical Christians and orthodox Jews."

It's unclear whether next versions of Internet Explorer would deny actively browsing gay sites, or Microsoft Office would wipe out any reference to homosexuality from documents taking advantage of a new improved autocorrection feature. Reverend Hutcherson didn't make clear what would be the Antioch Bible Church position on Linux and Open Office, or MacOS.

This guy Ken Hutcherson is the same one we came across when reading about the American Christian support for violent anti-gay Lithuanian groups, like that one called Watchmen on the Walls. And if you read the articles provided on links in this post, it will become quite apparent that Hutcherson is just another greedy liar.

 

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Are you God Almighty?

Many a time you have thought of yourself as Divine, but are you really? Answer this test and find out!!!

1.- You know that some evil king named Herod is going to murder every child in his country aged below 2. You...
a) Denounce the situation to all the country's citizens so they can take measures.
b) Only warn your neighbors.
c) Escape to Egypt not giving notice to anybody.

2.- You're in need to send a message to humankind. You...
a) Being God Almighty, you appear before the whole humankind simultaneously.
b) Being God Almighty, you jam TV signals on prime time.
c) Being God Almighty, you appear before some obscure humble shepherds that nobody will believe.

3,- When thinking about having a baby...
a) You are going to have it with your wife/partner.
b) You think of adopting one.
c) You send a dove in charge of fertilizing some woman.

4.- You send some guy to the task of rescuing your chosen people from captivity in Egypt via a 40-years trip through the desert. When arriving to the promised land...
a) You give that guy an extra payment for the task.
b) You cheer that guy for doing his task well.
c) You tell that guy that you've decided him to die never setting foot on the promised land.

5.- You've got a son, the epitome of absolute goodness and justice, you send him to earth, and it seems that everybody there cheers and welcomes  him as leader of a just, equalitarian society...
a) You have him running for president of the Republic.
b) You name him King.
c) You leave him to be crucified.

6.- Your followers have founded a religion. What's your opinion about all the other beliefs?
a) I don't see myself as a religious person.
b) I do respect all other beliefs.
c) I think all people not believing in my followers' religion should be killed in a jihad or crusade, and this message I do make known by my followers on earth.

7.- When confronted to social injustice, you...
a) Being God Almighty, I do correct inequalities.
b) I give realms to the poor.
c) I leave things as is.

8.- Let's suppose you're the one and only God in creation. Would you allow other religions to exist?
a) I am atheist/agnostic.
b) Yes, but I'll make clear they'll go to hell.
c) Yes, but I'll make my representatives on earth to invade infidels' countries to rape and murder them on a jihad or crusade. After that, I'd send the infidels to hell.

9,- Do you believe in women's rights?
a) Yes.
b) No, but I admit the possibility that women have souls, and even that women could be qualified as human beings.
c) No. Women are inferior beings and that's made clear in my doctrine.

10.- Besides gold, what would you ask the Three Wise Men for?
a) A house and a good job.
b) A Wii and an iPhone.
c) Incense and myrrh.

SOLUTION:

Majority of A - No, you're not really God Almighty.
Majority of B - You've got manners. You've got some qualities to become god of some monotheist religion, but you lack toughness.
Majority of C - Indeed, you're God Almighty.

(Badly translated from Spanish, via Halón Disparado).

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Friday, November 16, 2007

Fair courts and homosexual life

On Gay News Blog, an entry questions "What would life in America be like without fair courts?", something worth reading. However, there's a hint to the answer in their other entry about Latvia Supreme Court, which took one year to uphold a lower court decision to ban 2006 Gay Pride Parade. Or even more close to life without fair courts could be close to that of Russia, where a Moscow court has backed another gay demonstration ban, yet again and again.

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March 2008: gay sex decriminalized in Nicaragua.

Andrés from Blabbeando (thank you very much) says it all: amidst the greatest surprise for most Nicaraguans, "the Nicaraguan National Assembly sidestepped the longstanding law that penalized sodomy between members of the same-sex with up to five years in prison by overwhelmingly voting to approve a new civil code that simply did not mention it."

It takes Ortega to decriminalize sex between consenting adults of the same gender, and yet there will be some people wondering how is it that many gay people are so crazy to support social, leftist policies.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Discharged homosexual soldiers to be honored

From Pink News:

"Several leading LGBT organizations in the United States are to join forces later this month to honor the 12,000 servicemen and women discharged as a result of the ban on openly gay, bisexual or lesbian people in the country's Armed Forces.
The current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy has been in place since 1994.
Commanders may not ask personnel their sexual orientation, but LGB people who are open about their sexuality may not serve openly.
The Human Rights Campaign has joined with the Servicemembers United, Log Cabin Republicans, Servicemembers Legal Defence Network and Liberty Education Forum, to host a three-day tribute, beginning on Friday, November 30th, the 14th Anniversary of DADT being signed into law,
12,000 flags will be placed on the National Mall in Washington DC, one for every discharged service member.
In addition to recognizing the servicemembers discharged under DADT the event is planned to serve as a reminder of the hundreds of thousands unrecognized gay and lesbian Americans who have fought for the US in previous conflicts."

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Blame it all on The Gays

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Amnesty International to focus on Lithuania homophobia

Pink News informs that Amnesty International is launching a campaign against Lithuania's homophobia. Says AI:

"To persecute people for their sexual orientation is to violate their fundamental human rights. Amnesty International calls on the Lithuanian authorities to respect the right to peaceful freedom of assembly for all, the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation and to actively promote respect for diversity in their country. The Lithuanian authorities also need to offer adequate police protection to the country's gay community."

Recent incidents in that European country comprise refusals for EU truck drives supporting anti-discrimination, bus drivers banning homosexuality-inclusive ads, and Lithuanian authorities banning ILGA public events in support of anti-homophobia in the country.

New hope dawns in Poland

LGBT activists have asked newly appointed Poland prime minister Donald Tusk to "discuss legalisation of civil unions, the introduction of comprehensive sexual education in schools and the ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation." Unlike former prime minister, president's twin Jaroslaw Kaczynski of the Law and Justice party; Tusk and his party, while remaining into conservative stances in politics, are more likely to approach to European Union civil rights standards especially in homosexuality issues, Pink News informs. Within one week, on November 17th, people will see to which extent liberalizing measures in terms of homosexual repression or allowance find their way within this Poland new government, the March of Equality in Poznan having been planned for that date.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Party for the Rights news: how to split a blog in two

Ralph-01For all our readers who have voted in that poll last month, where the majority asked for eye candy to be published in Party for the Rights, here are the news.

We have decided to keep Party for the Rights within its first limits of politics, opinion and news, but since a majority wanted to see pictures (at least) we must give people what people want, so we're creating a brother blog called Candy for the Eye where we're going to publish pictures of models taken from public domain sites and mailing lists. Such picture sets will include nudity most of the time, some times will depict explicit sexual action among men, and some other times will include some particular fetish. We're not taking a single line of model ethnicity and we're open to suggestions, submissions of pictures you want to see in the blog, and every other idea you want to point out.

As a first starting point, here's the model whose photoset is being published today at Candy for the Eye. We don't have much details on his career and those pictures are dated long ago (we mean several years ago) but we do think that he can keep us guys in the mood for mambo anytime.

Oh, and finally, where's the link for that new blog? Well, you'll have to discover yourself. Hint: drag your mouse over the picture and see what happens.

Shades of Love: Black Homosexuality, volume 1

While most of the world and especially in the United States of America, LGBT activists are comparing homosexual rights to Black Civil Rights, for instance in this article, other organizations and bodies took a different approach. For those of us not living the American reality, it's not easy to understand how being gay and Black can shape life into an environment which poses itself to appear to foreigners as the Big Melting Pot and Land of Opportunity, though having its own issues, problems and unbalances that are only known to those people experiencing American life.

By Ijaba Films, Shades of Love: Black Homosexuality is a trilogy of documentaries that express the experiences and problems of black homosexuals. Volume one dispels the myth about the origin of homosexuality among those of African descent. It exposes the many misconceptions that there was no homosexuality in pre-colonial Africa and that homosexuality was introduced to Africans by Europeans. This volume also brings into the open the rampant racism within the LGBT communities. It exposes the hypocrisy among those invoking the spirit of the civil rights movement in an effort to obtain gay rights, who, while doing so, are ferociously practicing the same racism that sparked the civil rights movement of days past.

 

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

All God's creatures, big and small...

"I love all of God's creations - heterosexuals and homosexuals alike - and I understand that all of us are prone to excesses, rebellion and sin," writes Betty Ann Blaine in The Jamaica Observer. "But..."

You know there's always a but. They love us homosexuals but we're endangering the world and we should be terminated with the utmost love. They love all God's creatures big and small, and homosexuals are lower in the love scale than cockroaches. They love all human beings made in the image of God but homosexuals should be put to death or forced labor in order to "keep my children safe from deviant, satanic influences".

And why is that such so religious people can't seem to have an own ethic system of values outside their bigoted scriptures? Are they just zombie-minded children unable to know what's right and wrong apart of what the Bible says? Or simply programmed empty minds that repeat the program like parrots?

Uh, enough of blogging today, but don't miss this next weekend when Party for the Rights is going to make a big statement and developments in regards to that poll we asked you earlier last month. We're getting ready to split and open a twin Nude Pictures Blog.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Mother wins lawsuit over gay porn

Edge Boston publishes this piece of news about a Tennessee woman whose two daughters were "exposed" to gay porn video sequences while staying at a California motel, the Value Lodge, which doesn't seem to use a pay-per-view system for pornography channels on its TV sets. Edge writes that "some might find the idea that someone could win thousands of dollars after two children are exposed to a few minutes of pornography ridiculous." Well, not that ridiculous, but one should think carefully what kind of parents are those who don't oversee the type of TV channels their kids could be watching. I don't know how to express this right in plain English, but the fact that one parent claims "emotional distress" over what seems to me it's her own fault for allowing the kids to play with remotes without proper supervision — that proper fact would made me reverse the judgement and rule that Mrs. McCombs would be liable to pay the motel those thousands. Based on stupidity, laissez faire and inability to be a good parent. Heterosexuals and the religious right may say that we gays are not good parents and all that stuff, but I bet I can raise any child much better, more balanced, and psychologically and physically fitter than any of those stereotyped Americans who tend to rely on lawsuits every time they commit a mistake. Period.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Crimes against nature in North Carolina

While Sir Ian McKellen is busy fighting Singapore sodomy laws which turned out to be just anti-gay sex laws because sodomy and oral sex are now allowed for heterosexual couples, in North Carolina, United States of America, a guy aged 19 is being charged with "crimes against nature" for practising oral sex with a fellow tennis High School team mate, who allegedly got awake after Mr. Bivens stated to perform the fellatio. Over here in Spain we really do hope this is not a sample of the Freedom that America wants to shed the world with. Well, maybe not all Spaniards, I'm sure that the Catholic hierarchy, former prime minister Mr. Aznar and other ultrarightists, ultracatholic and neofrancoists will be delighted with morality laws.

Rabbi points out Scripture must be interpreted, not literalized

Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly homosexual orthodox rabbi, said last Sunday on a sermon at St. Stephen Episcopal Church that "No one can say, ‘It says in the Scripture,' to ground any policy," in what's been seen as a disqualification of born again Christians who take the Bible as literal word. And in fact, who would be better than a rabbi to offer the best Biblical interpretation?. Greenberg added that while he wasn't saying that the Bible is not the revealed word of God, according to Jewish tradition God gave that word to man and entrusted him to decipher it. Whole news on The Columbus Dispatch and Pink News.

Global Gay Rights Chart: The Yogyakarta Principles

Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay will co-sponsor the New York event of the Yogyakarta Principles, a global charter for gay rights, at the United Nations on November 7, 2007, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Yogyakarta Principles, a landmark advance in the struggle to ensure basic human rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, were developed in response to well-documented patterns of abuse worldwide. These abuses, including rape, extrajudicial executions, torture, medical abuses, repression of free speech and assembly and discrimination in work, health, education, housing, access to justice and immigration, affect millions of people targeted for their actual or perceived sexual orientation.  
“These Latin American governments are standing up to show that fundamental human rights apply to everyone, regardless of sexual identity,” said Boris Dittrich, advocacy director in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender program at Human Rights Watch. “The Yogyakarta Principles underline the fact that no one should face violence or discrimination because of whom they love, how they look, or who they are.”  
Human Rights Watch urged UN member states to support the Yogyakarta Principles and end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. An important first step would be to de-criminalize homosexuality in 77 countries that still penalize same-sex relationships and in the seven countries that could impose the death penalty.  
Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson will address a side event on the principles, organized in parallel to the UN General Assembly. The forum, co-sponsored by Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, brings together nongovernmental organizations, UN representatives and state delegates for a discussion on the Yogyakarta Principles and the challenges of ending discrimination.  
Other speakers include Federico Villegas Beltrán, director of Human Rights at Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Worship; Ana Lucy Cabral, director of the Department for Human Rights and Social Issues of the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations; Sonia Correa from the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association and Sexuality Policy Watch; Philip Dayle from the International Commission of Jurists; and Miriam Maluwa, UNAIDS Country Coordinator for Jamaica, The Bahamas and Cuba.  
The discussion is organized by ARC-International, the Center for Women’s  
Global Leadership, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, International Lesbian and Gay Association, and International Service for Human Rights.  

From HRW

Monday, November 05, 2007

Botero at the American University Museum

First it was Marlborough Gallery, then Berkeley University in California, now the Abu Ghraib series by Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero are shown at the American University Museum. Don't miss that. Author will be talking with public on November 6th.

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Saturday, November 03, 2007

Eye Candy

 

 

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Thursday, November 01, 2007

Angry Evangelicals

In another of their so godly and humble "freedom of speech for us" move, Scotland evangelicals got angry with Stonewall:

The nomination of two senior bishops as Bigot of the Year at tonight's Stonewall Awards has angered an evangelical group of Scottish Christians.
CARE Scotland said the nomination of the Bishop of Hereford and the Archbishop of Birmingham was an insult and in a letter to First Minister Alex Salmond called on the Scottish government to stop working with Stonewall.

It's so very typical from those bunches of hypocrites, demanding for freedoms for them but denying the rest of the world of all those freedoms - just go search for Voice of the Martyrs, the Southern Baptist Convention or whichever so proudly evangelical, pentecostalist or born again group of Truth Keepers; celebrating diversity by encouraging attacks on peoples other than their own community, then saying they're under direct fire whenever someone exposes their flaws and lies. I feel a deep sorrow for all the children raised in such households, doomed to play with toys such these, homeschooled and able to access only biased information not on every matter, with no taste of other love than that born again love in Jesus, never unconditional but subjected to the acceptance of their parents faith... And then they would still claim they're a church and not a cult.

Homosexuality: "The Verdict is In" video.

In Austin, Texas, the very "buckle of the Bible belt," friends of Soulforce turn their sanctuary into a courtroom for one last time. Before a judge and a jury, the anti-gay charges are presented by more than a dozen public figures who have attacked God's gay children in television specials and on nationally distributed video tapes.
"If church leaders can't decide about us," says Dr. Mel White, Producer of the "Verdict" video, "then we'll decide about ourselves."
"When this trial ends," Dr. White adds, "we hope viewers will join us in saying proudly: 'Never again will we allow our sanctuaries to become courtrooms. No longer will we sit still while our lives and loves are studied and debated as though we weren't even in the room. Our rights are no longer up for grabs. It's settled at last.'"
The most recent biblical, medical, psychiatric, psychological, and scientific evidence is presented to combat the myths and lies often used against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons by anti-gay religious leaders and institutions. Come and hear the evidence and decide for yourself!

 

NYT Magazine on Evangelical Political Support

Under the heading The Evangelical Crackup, David D Kirkpatrick wrote another interesting piece in the NYT Magazine on October 28th, which we're reproducing below (copyright due).

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State — the public face of the conservative Christian political movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel’s pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, “Answering the Call.” Major national conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its North American Mission Board.

For years, Fox flaunted his allegiance to the Republican Party, urging fellow pastors to make the same “confession” and calling them “sissies” if they didn’t. “We are the religious right,” he liked to say. “One, we are religious. Two, we are right.”

His congregation, for the most part, applauded. Immanuel and Wichita’s other big churches were seedbeds of the conservative Christian activism that burst forth three decades ago. In the 1980s, when theological conservatives pushed the moderates out of the Southern Baptist Convention, Immanuel and Fox were both at the forefront. In 1991, when Operation Rescue brought its “Summer of Mercy” abortion protests to Wichita, Immanuel’s parishioners leapt to the barricades, helping to establish the city as the informal capital of the anti-abortion movement. And Fox’s confrontational style packed ever more like-minded believers into the pews. He more than doubled Immanuel’s official membership to more than 6,000 and planted the giant cross on its roof.

So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August last year that it was his final appearance in the pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from Atlanta to Grand Rapids. Fox told the congregation that he was quitting so he could work full time on “cultural issues.” Within days, The Wichita Eagle reported that Fox left under pressure. The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. “It just wasn’t pertinent,” Associate Pastor Gayle Tenbrook later told me.

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

These days, Fox has taken his fire and brimstone in search of a new pulpit. He rented space at the Johnny Western Theater at the Wild West World amusement park until it folded. Now he preaches at a Best Western hotel. “I don’t mind telling you that I paid a price for the political stands I took,” Fox said. “The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals.”

Fox is not the only conservative Christian to feel the heat of those battles, even in — of all places — Wichita. Within three months of his departure, the two other most influential conservative Christian pastors in the city had left their pulpits as well. And in the silence left by their voices, a new generation of pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party — some as likely to lean left as right — is beginning to speak up.

Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.

Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.

The founding generation of leaders like Falwell and Dobson, who first guided evangelicals into Republican politics 30 years ago, is passing from the scene. Falwell died in the spring. Paul Weyrich, 65, the indefatigable organizer who helped build Falwell’s Moral Majority and much of the rest of the movement, is confined to a wheelchair after losing his legs because of complications from a fall. Dobson, who is 71 and still vigorous, is already planning for a succession at Focus on the Family; it is expected to tack toward the less political family advice that is its bread and butter.

The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that expunged political and theological moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention are retiring or dying off, too. And in September, when I called a spokesman for the ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James Kennedy, another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I learned that Kennedy had “gone home to the Lord” at 2 a.m. that morning.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

The generational and theological shifts in the evangelical world are turning the next election into a credibility test for the conservative Christian establishment. The current Republican front-runner in national polls, Rudolph W. Giuliani, could hardly be less like their kind of guy: twice divorced, thrice married, estranged from his children and church and a supporter of legalized abortion and gay rights. Alarmed at the continued strength of his candidacy, Dobson and a group of about 50 evangelical Christians leaders agreed last month to back a third party if Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee. But polls show that Giuliani is the most popular candidate among white evangelical voters. He has the support, so far, of a plurality if not a majority of conservative Christians. If Giuliani captures the nomination despite the threat of an evangelical revolt, it will be a long time before Republican strategists pay attention to the demands of conservative Christian leaders again. And if the Democrats capitalize on the current demoralization to capture a larger share of evangelical votes, the credibility damage could be just as severe.

“There was a time when evangelical churches were becoming largely and almost exclusively the Republican Party at prayer,” said Marvin Olasky, the editor of the evangelical magazine World and an informal adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor. “To some extent — we have to see how much — the Republicans have blown it. That opportunity to lock up that constituency has vanished. The ball now really is in the Democrats’ court.”

I covered the Christian conservative movement for The New York Times during the 2004 election, at the moment of its greatest triumph. To the bewilderment of many even in the upper reaches of his own party, Karl Rove bet President Bush’s re-election on boosting the conservative Christian turnout, contending that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because four million of those voters stayed home. President Bush missed few opportunities to remind evangelicals that he was one of them — and they got the message.

I bowed my head in a good number of swing-state churches in 2004. I saw the passion Bush aroused among theologically orthodox Protestants. And I got to know many of the most influential conservative Christian leaders, most of whom threw themselves into urging their constituents to the polls.

Now, as the 2008 campaign heated up in the months before the first primaries, I wondered how the world was looking from the pulpits and pews. And so I went to Wichita, as close as any place to the heart of conservative Christian America. Wichita has a long history of religious crusades. A hundred years ago, Carrie Nation made her name smashing up Wichita’s bars. More recently, the presence of Dr. George Tiller, a specialist in late-term abortions, has kept anti-abortion passions high, attracting Operation Rescue to Wichita for the Summer of Mercy protests in 1991. Two years later, a lone activist shot and wounded Dr. Tiller. Evolution, the flash point that split mainline and evangelical Protestants in the early 20th century, is still hotly debated in Wichita. The Kansas school board has reversed itself on the subject again and again in recent years.

At the same time, Wichita is also a decent proxy for plenty of other blue-collar but socially conservative places like Allentown, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio — the swing districts of the swing states that decide elections. A center of aerospace manufacturing, Wichita was a union town and a Democratic stronghold for much of the last century. But all that changed when the conservative Christian movement took root in its suburban megachurches three decades ago, turning theological traditionalists into Republican activists. That story was the centerpiece of the liberal writer Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” He might have called it “What’s the Matter With Wichita?”

I arrived just in time for the annual Fourth of July Patriotic Celebration at the 7,000-member Central Christian Church, where Independence Day is second only to Christmas. Thousands of people drove back to the church Sunday evening for a pageant of prayers, songs, a flag ceremony and an American history quiz pitting kids against their parents. “In God We Still Trust” was the theme of the event. “You place your hand on this Bible when you swear to tell the truth,” two men sang in the opening anthem.

“There’s no separation; we’re one nation under Him.”

“There are those among us who want to push Him out And erase

His name from everything this country’s all about.

From the schoolhouse to the courthouse, they are silencing

His word Now it’s time for all believers to make our voices heard.”

Later, as a choir in stars-and-stripes neckties and scarves belted out “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a cluster of men in olive military fatigues took the stage carrying a flag. They lifted the pole to a 45-degree angle and froze in place around it: a re-enactment of the famous photograph of the American triumph at Iwo Jima. The narrator of a preceding video montage had already set the stage by comparing the Iwo Jima flag raising to another long-ago turning point in a “fierce battle for the hearts of men” — the day 2,000 years ago when “a heavy cross was lifted up on top of the mount called Golgotha.”

A battle flag as the crucifixion: the church rose to a standing ovation.

There was one conspicuous omission from the Patriotic Celebration: any mention of President Bush or the Iraq war. The only reference to the president was a single image in a video montage. Bush was standing with Donald Rumsfeld, head bowed at a grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

Every time I visited an evangelical church in 2004, it seemed that a member’s brother or cousin had just returned from Iraq with reports that much greater progress was being made than the news media let on. The admiration for President Bush as a man of faith was nearly universal, and some talked of his contest with John Kerry as a spiritual battle. It would have been hard to overstate the Christian conservative leadership’s sense of the presidential race’s historical significance. In the days before the election, Dobson told me he believed the culture war was “rapidly approaching the climax, with everything that we are about on the line” and the election might be “the pivot point.”

The morning after the Republican triumph, a White House operative called Dobson to thank him personally for his support, as Dobson told me in conversation later that day. He bluntly told the operative that the Bush campaign owed his victory in large part to concerned Christian voters. He warned that God had given the nation only “a short reprieve” from its impending “self-destruction.” If the administration slighted its conservative Christian supporters, most importantly in filling Supreme Court vacancies, Dobson continued, Republicans would “pay a price in four years.”

On that front, at least, Bush has not disappointed. President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., have given Dobson and his allies much to be thankful for. Nor has Bush flinched from any politically feasible Christian conservative goal, even when it has been unpopular. He has blocked federal financing for embryonic stem-cell research and intervened to help keep Terri Schiavo on life support. But of course there were moments when the White House seemed to care more about Social Security reform, and in the end the culture did not change.

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

Some claim the falloff in support for Bush reflects the unrealistic expectations pumped up by conservative Christian leaders. But no one denies the war is a factor. Christianity Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent” for their swift support of invading Iraq.

“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ ”

Welsh, who favors pressed khaki pants and buttoned-up polo shirts, is a staunch conservative, a committed Republican and, personally, a politics junkie. But he told me he was wary of talking too much about politics or public affairs around the church because his congregation was so divided over the war in Iraq.

Welsh said he considered himself among those who still support the president. “I think he is a good man,” Welsh said, slowly. “He has a heart, a spiritual heart.”

But like most of the people I met at Wichita’s evangelical churches, his support for Bush sounded more than a little agonized — closer to sympathy than admiration. “Bush may not have the best people around him,” he added, delicately. “He may not have made the best decisions. He is in a quagmire right now and maybe doesn’t know how to get out. Because to pull out now would say, ‘I was wrong from the very beginning.’ ”

Some were less ambivalent. “We know we want to get rid of Bush,” Linda J. Hogle, a product demonstrator at Sam’s Club, told me when I asked her about the 2008 election at her evangelical church’s Fourth of July picnic.

“I am glad he can’t run again,” agreed her friend, Floyd Willson. Hogle and Willson both voted for President Bush in 2004. Both are furious at the war and are looking to vote for a Democrat next year. “Upwards of a thousand boys that have been needlessly killed, it is all just politics,” Willson said.

The 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — the core of the evangelical movement — may be rethinking its relationship with the Republican Party, too. Three years ago, I attended its annual meeting in Indianapolis and tagged along as the denomination’s former president and several of its leaders invited the assembled pastors across a walkway to an adjacent hotel for a Bush-Cheney campaign “pastors’ reception.”

Over soft drinks, Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition director then working for the Bush campaign, told the pastors just how far they could go for the campaign without jeopardizing their churches’ tax-exempt status. Among the suggestions: “host a citizenship Sunday for voter registration,” “identify someone who will help in voter registration and outreach” or organize a “ ‘party for the president’ with other pastors.”

Republicans should not expect that kind of treatment from Southern Baptists again any time soon. In June of last year, in one of the few upsets since conservatives consolidated their hold on the denomination 20 years ago, the establishment’s hand-picked candidates — well-known national figures in the convention — lost the internal election for the convention’s presidency. The winner, Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., campaigned on a promise to loosen up the conservatives’ tight control. He told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.” (It’s a formulation that comes up a lot in evangelical circles these days.)

I asked Page about the Bush-Cheney reception at the 2004 convention. He sounded appalled. “That will not be happening with me,” he said, repeating it for emphasis. “I have cautioned our denomination to be very careful not to be seen as in lock step with any political party.”

Southern Baptists called their denomination’s turn to the right the “conservative resurgence,” meaning both a crackdown on unorthodox doctrine and a corresponding expulsion of political moderates. Page said he considered his election “a clear sign” that rank-and-file Southern Baptists felt the “conservative ascendancy has gone far enough.”

Page is meeting personally with all the leading presidential candidates in both parties — Republican and Democrat. (His home state of South Carolina is holding an early primary.) But unlike some of his predecessors, he won’t endorse any of them, he said.

“Most of us Southern Baptists are right-wing Republicans,” he added. “But we also recognize that times change.” For example, Page said Christians should be wary of Republican ties to “big business.”

Elders like Dobson say the movement has been through doldrums before. Think of the face-off between the Republican Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton in the 1996 election. Dobson later said he had cast his ballot for a third party rather than vote for a moderate like Dole. But then, it was defeat that sapped morale; today, it is victory. Some younger evangelical conservatives say they are fighting just to keep their movement together. (Dobson told me he was too busy to comment for this article.)

The Rev. Rick Scarborough — founder of the advocacy organization Vision America, author of a book called “Liberalism Kills Kids” and at 57 an aspiring successor to Falwell or Dobson — has been barnstorming the country on what he calls a “Seventy Weeks to Save America Tour.”

“We are somewhat in disarray right now,” he told me, beginning a familiar story. “As a 26-year-old man, I heard there was a born-again Christian from Georgia running for president.” Millions of evangelicals turned out for the first time in 1976 to vote for Jimmy Carter. But then, the story goes, his support for feminism and abortion rights sent them running the other way.

“The first time I voted was for Carter,” Scarborough recalled. “The second time was for ‘anybody but Carter,’ because he had betrayed everything I hold dear.

“Unfortunately,” Scarborough concluded, “there is the same feeling in our community right now with George Bush. He appeared so right and so good. He talked a good game about family values around election time. But there has been a failure to follow through.”

For the conservative Christian leadership, what is most worrisome about the evangelical disappointment with President Bush is that it coincides with a widening philosophical rift. Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelicals theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft — a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft.

But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers — take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.

Older evangelical traditionalists like Prof. David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston argue that the newer approaches represent a “capitulation” to the broader culture — similar to the capitulation that in his view led the mainline churches into decline. Proponents of the new evangelicalism, on the other hand, say their broader agenda reflects a frustration with the scarce victories in the culture war and revulsion at the moral entanglements of partisan alliances (Abu Ghraib, Jack Abramoff). Scot McKnight, an evangelical theologian at North Park University in Chicago, said, “It is the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the 20th century, a new kind of Christian social conscience.”

Secular sociologists say evangelicals’ changing view of society reflects their changing place in it. Once trailing in education and income, evangelicals have caught up over the last 40 years. “The social-issues arguments are the first manifestation of a rural outlook transposed into a more urban or suburban setting,” John Green, of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Now having been there for a while, that kind of hard-edged politics no longer appeals to them. They still care about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also interested in other, more middle-class arguments.”

Some rebellious evangelical pastors and theologians of the new school refer to themselves as the emergent church. Others who are less openly rebellious but share a similar approach point to the examples of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. “What Warren and Hybels are doing is reshaping the perception of what it means to be a Christian in our country and our world,” McKnight says.

Warren and Hybels are also highly entrepreneurial. Each has built a network of thousands of mostly evangelical churches that rely on their ministries for sermon ideas, worship plans or audio-video materials to enliven services. As a result, their influence may rival that of any denominational leader in the country.

Warren, pastor of the Saddleback church in Lake Forest, Calif., is the author of the best seller “The Purpose Driven Life.” His church has sold materials to thousands of other churches for “campaigns” called 40 Days of Purpose and, more recently, 40 Days of Community. If more Christians worked to alleviate needs in their local communities, he suggests in the church’s promotional materials, “the church would become known more for the love it shows than for what it is against” a thinly veiled dig at the conservative Christian “culture war.”

Warren is clearly a theological and cultural conservative. Before the 2004 election, he wrote a letter to other pastors emphasizing the need to combat abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But these days Warren talks much more often about fighting AIDS and poverty. He raised hackles among conservatives last year by having Barack Obama give a speech at his church. And he also came under fire last year when he traveled to Damascus, Syria, where he implicitly criticized the Bush administration for refusing to talk with unfriendly nations.

“Isolation and silence has never solved conflict,” he said in a press release defending his trip.

Hybels, founder of the Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, is very possibly the single-most-influential pastor in America; in the last 15 years, his Willow Creek Association has grown to include more than 12,000 churches. Many invite their staff members and lay leaders to participate by telecast in Willow Creek’s annual leadership conferences, creating a virtual gathering of tens of thousands. Dozens of churches in Wichita, including Central Christian and other past bastions of conservative activism, are part of the association.

As his stature has grown, Hybels has seemed more willing to irk Christian conservative political leaders — and even some in his own congregation. He set off a furor a few years ago when he invited former President Bill Clinton to speak at one of his conferences. And the Iraq war has brought into sharp relief Hybels’s differences with conservatives like Dobson.

Most conservative Christian leaders have resolutely supported Bush’s foreign policy. Dobson and others have even talked about defending Western civilization from radical Islam as a precondition for protecting family values. But on the eve of the Iraq invasion, Hybels preached a sermon called “Why War?” Laying out three approaches to war — realism, just-war theory and pacifism — he implored members of his congregation to re-examine their own thinking and then try to square it with the Bible. In the process, he left little doubt about where he personally stood. He called himself a pacifist.

Hybels traced the “J curve” of mounting deaths from war through the centuries. “In case you are wondering about this, wonder how God feels about all this,” he said. “It breaks the heart of God.”

At his annual leadership conference this summer, Hybels interviewed former President Jimmy Carter. To some Christian conservatives, it was quite a provocation. Carter, after all, was their first great disappointment, a Southern Baptist who denounced the conservative takeover and an early critic of the Bush administration. Some pastors canceled plans to attend.

“I think that a superpower ought to be the exemplification of a commitment to peace,” Carter told Hybels, who nodded along. “I would like for anyone in the world that’s threatened with conflict to say to themselves immediately: ‘Why don’t we go to Washington? They believe in peace and they will help us get peace.’ ” Carter added: “This is just a simple but important extrapolation from what a human being ought to do, and what a human being ought to do is what Jesus Christ did, who was a champion of peace.”

In a conversation I had with him, Hybels told me he considered politics a path to “heartache and disappointment” for a Christian leader. But he also described the message of his Willow Creek Association to its member churches in terms that would warm a liberal’s heart.

“We have just pounded the drum again and again that, for churches to reach their full redemptive potential, they have to do more than hold services — they have to try to transform their communities,” he said. “If there is racial injustice in your community, you have to speak to that. If there is educational injustice, you have to do something there. If the poor are being neglected by the government or being oppressed in some way, then you have to stand up for the poor.”

In the past, Hybels has scrupulously avoided criticizing conservative Christian political figures like Falwell or Dobson. But in my talk with him, he argued that the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement had lost touch with their base. “The Indians are saying to the chiefs, ‘We are interested in more than your two or three issues,’ ” Hybels said. “We are interested in the poor, in racial reconciliation, in global poverty and AIDS, in the plight of women in the developing world.”

He brought up the Rev. Jim Wallis, the lonely voice of the tiny evangelical left. Wallis has long argued that secular progressives could make common cause with theologically conservative Christians. “What Jim has been talking about is coming to fruition,” Hybels said.

Conservative Christian leaders in Washington acknowledge a “leftward drift” among evangelicals, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and the movement’s chief advocate in Washington. He told me he believed that Hybels and many of his admirers had, in effect, fallen away from orthodox evangelical theology. Perkins compared the phenomenon to the century-old division in American Protestantism between the liberal mainline and the orthodox evangelical churches. “It is almost like another split coming within the evangelicals,” he said.

Wondering how those theological and political debates were unfolding in conservative Wichita, I sought out the Rev. Gene Carlson, another prominent conservative Christian pastor who left his church last year. He spent four decades as the senior pastor of the Westlink Christian Church, expanding it to 7,000 members. He was one of the most important local leaders of the Summer of Mercy abortion protests. He tapped Westlink’s collection plate to help finance its operations and even led a battalion of about 40 clergy members and hundreds of lay people to jail in an act of civil disobedience.

Sitting with his wife in a quiet living room with teddy bears on the bookshelves, Carlson, who is 70, told me he is one member of the movement’s founding generation who has had second thoughts. He said he still considers abortion evil. He called the anti-abortion protests “prophetic,” in the sense of the Old Testament prophets who warned of God’s wrath. But Carlson was blunt about the results. “It didn’t really change abortion,” he said.

“I thought in my enthusiasm,” he told me with a smile, “that somehow we could band together and change things politically and everything will be fine.” But the closing of Dr. Tiller’s clinic was fleeting. Electing Christian politicians never seemed to change much. “When you mix politics and religion,” Carlson said, “you get politics.”

In more recent battles, Carlson has hung back. On the Sunday before the referendum on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Carlson reminded his congregation that homosexuality was hardly the only form of sex the Bible condemned. Any extramarital sex is a sin, he told his congregation, so they should not point fingers.

“We wouldn’t want to exclude some group because we thought their sin was worse than ours,” Carlson told me with a laugh.

Carlson is a registered Republican, though he now considers himself an independent. He volunteered that he now leans left on some social-welfare issues and the environment. He considers himself among the “green evangelicals” who see a biblical mandate for government action to stop global warming. The Westlink church is another member of Hybels’s Willow Creek Association and a satellite location for telecasts of the annual leadership conference. Carlson said he admired Hybels for “challenging some of the sacred cows that we evangelicals have built.”

“There is this sense that the personal Gospel is what evangelicals believe and the social Gospel is what liberal Christians believe,” Carlson said, “and, you know, there is only one Gospel that has both social and personal dimensions to it.” He once felt lonely among evangelicals for taking that approach, he told me. “Now it is a growing phenomenon,” he said.

“The religious right peaked a long time ago,” he added. “As a historical, sociological phenomenon, it has seen its heyday. Something new is coming.”

These days, Westlink has found less confrontational ways to oppose abortion, mainly by helping to pay for a medical center called Choices. Housed in a cozy-looking white-shingled cottage next to Dr. Tiller’s bunkerlike abortion facility, Choices discourages women from ending pregnancies by offering 3-D ultrasound scans and adoption advice.

Carlson’s protégé and successor, Todd Carter, 42, said: “I don’t believe the problem of abortion will be solved by overturning Roe v. Wade. It won’t. To me, it is a Gospel issue.”

The Rev. Joe Wright, the longtime senior pastor who built Central Christian to 7,000 members, was the third leading pastor in Wichita to step down at the end of last year. He is a tall, heavy man, and he embraced me in a sweaty bear hug the first time we met, at a local chain restaurant.

Wright, who is 64, had been another leader of the Operation Mercy protests. But unlike Carlson, he plunged further into conservative politics, eventually as a host of the radio show “Answering the Call,” with Fox. They spent months together traveling the state and lobbying the Statehouse during the same-sex marriage fight.

Wright retired in good standing with his congregation, but he told me the political battle had taken a toll.

“On Sunday morning when I would mention it, there were people who would hang their heads and say, ‘Oh, here we go again,’ ” he said. “And then, of course, some of them wouldn’t come back.”

Wright said he was worried about theological and political trends among young evangelicals, even in Kansas. “If we had to depend on the young evangelical pastors to get us a marriage amendment here in Kansas it never would have happened,” Wright said.

He went on to say he was dismayed to feel resistance to his political sermons and voter-registration drives from younger associate pastors at his own church, some of whom moved elsewhere. (Some of his parishioners had already told me the same thing, separately.)

“Even in the groups I travel in and grew up in — the preachers who are from the same background I was in, who run in the same circles I ran in, who went to the same schools I did — I don’t find many young evangelical preachers who are willing to stand up and take a stand on the hard issues, because they think they might offend somebody,” he said.

“I think the Gospel is offensive, and I think the cross is offensive,” Wright continued. “I think Jesus loved everybody and I think he loved the Pharisees, but he certainly told them how the cow eats the cabbage.”

Paul Hill is one of the young associate pastors who left Central Christian after philosophical clashes with Wright. He took a band of young members with him when he started his own emergent-style church, the Wheatland Mission. “Even in Wichita, times have changed,” Hill said. “I think people will hear the Gospel better when it is expressed not just verbally but holistically, through acts of hospitality and by bringing people together.

“In the evangelical church in general there is kind of a push back against the Republican party and a feeling of being used by the Republican political machine,” he continued. “There are going to be a lot of evangelicals willing to vote for a Democrat because there are 40 million people without health insurance and a Democrat is going to do something about that.”

With Wright, Carlson and Fox out of the spotlight, new religious leaders are stepping to the fore. When legalized gambling was proposed in the Wichita area this year, the pastor who took the lead in rallying other clergy members to stop the measure was Michael Gardner of the First United Methodist Church, a mainline liberal who supports abortion rights and jousted with Fox over the same-sex marriage amendment on competing church telecasts.

After decades when evangelical megachurches have exploded at the expense of dwindling mainline congregations, Gardner is poaching the other way. Each Sunday night he convenes an informal emergent church worship group of his own, known as Next Wichita. Several dozen people, mostly 20 to 30 years old, show up to break bread, talk Scripture and plan volunteer projects. “People in that age group are much more attracted to participatory theology, very resistant to being told what to do or what to think,” he said.

Patrick Bergquist, a former associate pastor at a local evangelical church who as a child attended Immanuel Baptist, became a regular. “From a theological standpoint, I am an evangelical,” Bergquist, who is 28, explained to me. “But I don’t mean that anyone who is gay is necessarily going to hell, or that anyone who has an abortion is going to hell.” After a life of voting Republican, he said, he recently made a small contribution to the Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

Is the religious right dead?” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told me that question was the title of the first chapter of a new book he is writing with Harry Jackson, a socially conservative African-American pastor.

Perkins’s answer is emphatically no — “we are seeing a lot of pastors coming back like never before” — but the 2008 election is the movement’s first big test since the triumph and letdown with President Bush. And so far most Christian conservative leaders do not like what they see. Although all the Republican primary candidates, including Giuliani, spoke at the Family Research Council’s “values voters” meeting last weekend, only the dark horses have consistent conservative records on abortion, gay rights and religion in public life.

Of these, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, stands out in the polls and in his rhetoric. At last fall’s values-voters meetings, the other candidates focused on establishing their Christian conservative credentials. Huckabee dispensed with that by reminding his audience of his years as a pastor. Then he challenged the crowd to give more money to their churches and talked about education and health care. On the campaign trail, he criticizes chief executives’ pay and says his faith demands environmental regulation. “We shouldn’t allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car,” Huckabee said in a recent debate. “We shouldn’t be satisfied that elderly people are being abused or neglected in nursing homes.”

Huckabee told me that he welcomed a broadening of the evangelical political agenda. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he said, repeating a campaign theme.

But the leaders of the Christian conservative movement have not rallied to him. Many say he cannot win because he has not raised enough money. Perkins and others have criticized Huckabee for taking too soft an approach to the Middle East. Others worry that his record on taxes will anger allies on the right. And some Christian conservatives take his “gestation period” line as a slight to their movement.

“They finally have the soldier they have been waiting for, and they shouldn’t send me out into the battlefield without supplies,” Huckabee told me in exasperation. He argued that the movement’s leaders would “become irrelevant” if they started putting political viability or low taxes ahead of their principles about abortion and marriage.

“In biblical terms, it is like the salt losing its flavor; it’s sand,” Huckabee said. “Some of them have spent too long in Washington. . . . I think they are going to have a hard time going out into the pews and saying tax policy is what Jesus is about, that he said, ‘Come unto me all you who are overtaxed and I will give you rest.’ ”

Up to this point, though, most conservative Christian leaders are still locked in debate about which front-runner they dislike the least. Dobson’s public statements have traced the arc of their dissatisfaction. Last October, he observed that grass-roots evangelicals would have a hard time voting for Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon. In January, he said he could never vote for Senator John McCain. More recently, Dobson panned Fred Thompson, too, for opposing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. “He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to,’ ” Dobson wrote in an e-mail message to allies. “Not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

Finally, at the end of last month, Dobson was the foremost among the roughly 50 Christian conservative organizers who declared they would support a third-party candidate if the nomination went to Giuliani, who is their greatest fear. Some even talk of McCain — once anathema to them — as a better bet.

I could see why they were worried. Among the evangelicals of suburban Wichita, I found that Giuliani was easily the most popular of the Republican candidates, even among churchgoers who knew his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. Some trusted him to fight Islamic radicalism; others praised his cleanup of New York.

“There are a few issues we are on different sides of — a lot of it is around abortion — and he is not the most spiritual guy,” said Kent Brummer, a retired Boeing engineer leaving services at Central Christian. “But to me that doesn’t mean that he would not make a good president, if he represents both sides.

“What I liked about George Bush is all of his moral side and all that,” Brummer added. “But somehow he didn’t have the strength to govern the way we hoped he would and that he should have.”

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

Many evangelicals are not sure what to make of it. “Shouldn’t we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life?” David Brody, a commentator for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, asked approvingly in response to Obama’s statements.

Many conservative Christian leaders say they can count on the specter of a second Clinton presidency to fire up their constituents. But the prospect of an Obama-Giuliani race is another matter. “You would have a bunch of people who traditionally vote Republican going over to Obama,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the Christian conservative American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., known for its consumer boycotts over obscenity or gay issues.

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year. “There is just that ill feeling, and part of it is his faith,” Welsh said. “Is his faith anti-Christian? Is he a Muslim? And what about the school where he was raised?”

“Obama sounds too much like Osama,” said Kayla Nickel of Westlink. “When he says his name, I am like, ‘I am not voting for a Muslim!’ ”

Fox, meanwhile, is already preparing to do his part to get Wichita’s conservative faithful to the polls next November. Standing before a few hundred worshipers at the Johnny Western Theater last summer, Fox warned his new congregation not to let go of that old-time religion. “Hell is just as hot as it ever was,” he reminded them. “It just has more people in it.”

Fox told me: “I think the religious community is probably reflective of the rest of the nation — it is very divided right now. This election process is going to reveal a lot about where the religious right and the religious community is. It will show unity or the lack of it.”

But liberals, he said, should not start gloating. “Some might compare the religious right to a snake,” he said. “We may be in our hole right now, but we can come out and bite you at any time.”

David D. Kirkpatrick is a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.