ANNIVERSARY OF MATTHEW SHEPHERD'S DEATH - 12 YEARS

Matthew Wayne Shepard - December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998

Matthew Shepard was a member of the LGBTA (now SPECTRUM) in 1998. On October 6th of that year, he was beaten by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. He died 5 days later from his injuries. While his death is something that his friends at SPECTRUM will never forget, we also hope to remember his life as well. Matthew was more than a gay person who died; he was also a gay person who lived.

Twelve years and many more tears later, we remember Matthew, who was tortured and murdered because he was gay. We remember all the precious lives cut off too soon by suicide, because the youngsters, who were gay, were no longer able to bear the beatings, bullying, and/or harassment.

Let us pray:

A Litany for children who have died from bullying
--by Kirkepiscatoid

O God of justice and mercy, we pray that no more daughters and sons in this world die as the result of bullying simply because of who they are; be it race, religion, sexual orientation, or social awkwardness. Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.

That our schools become places of nurturing and hope rather than shame and derision. Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.

That our teachers instill values of charity and acceptance in all children so there is no need for one child to feel superior over another. Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.

That parents can put aside what they were sometimes taught, in order to promote tolerance and diversity at home. Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.

That our communities support children who feel “different from the others” and show them lives that are theirs to claim, lives they cannot begin to imagine to see at home. Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.

That all children can grow up feeling self-empowered and truly loved simply as themselves, and not suffer beatings and psychological abuse at home or school. Lord, in your mercy,
hear our prayer.

O Lord, you understand this above all others, for your only Son hung among thieves on a rough wooden cross on a barren hill, just as Matthew Shepard hung from a rail fence on a lonely road. Be our light in the darkness, Lord; protect our children and fill them with the love of your Holy Spirit; hold them in your Son’s loving arms in their most fearful hours, and be with them always.
Amen.

Photo from Wikipedia.

GEORGE W. BUSH LIBRARY - S. M. U.

With breathless anticipation, the crowd awaits the unveiling of the Bush statue.

Don't blame me. Blame Doug.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ELEANOR ROOSEVELT!

"A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water."

Eleanor Roosevelt

H/T to The Writer's Almanac.

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU'D HEARD IT ALL

From Candace Chellew-Hodge at Religious Dispatches:

Despite having heard a lot of bluster from the religious right over the years, they still sometimes have the ability to say something so totally brand new, and patently offensive, that it just knocks the wind right out of me. Take this gem quoted in the Colorado Springs Gazette over the weekend in a story about the recent rash of gay teen suicides:

Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said the rash September suicides by gays might be linked to the students believing they were born gay. “That creates hopelessness,” he said. “It is more loving and compassionate to say you don’t have to be gay for the rest of your lives.”

What would be far more loving and compassionate is for Sprigg and his compatriots to actually engage in a true act of compassion. “Compassion” literally means “to suffer with” or “suffer together.” We can only have compassion for someone when we understand, on a deeply personal level, what, exactly, is the other person’s struggle.

He said that?!!! Well, yes he did. In the name of compassion, no less, Peter Sprigg said that. As the author says, you thought you'd heard it all.

What makes the thought of be “being gay for the rest of your lives” such a horrible, shameful, terrible thought to even bear consideration is because Sprigg and people like him dedicate their entire careers to making the lives of gays and lesbians so incredibly miserable. They produce ridiculous studies full of lies that no reputable psychologist or social scientist would touch with a ten foot pole and when their scientific lies are exposed they play the religion card and say, “well, God didn’t create you gay.”

Just yesterday, included in the the readings from the Lectionary, which were referenced in the two sermons to which I linked, is the story of Ruth, the Moabite, the foreigner, the outcast, the despised, who - surprise! - was given the honor of becoming the great-grandmother of one of the greatest heroes in the Hebrew Testament, King David.

From another reading is the story of Jesus healing ten lepers. Lepers were only permitted in the company of other lepers, but Jesus allowed the lepers to approach him, and he sent them on their way telling them they would be healed. And all ten were healed, but only one returned to thank Jesus, a Samaritan, a twofold outcast, one of the despised that the Jewish people had nothing to do with. Jesus sent the Samaritan off again with the words "...your faith has made you well."

That Ruth and the Samaritan were amongst the despised by the people at the time was of no consequence to God's/Jesus' decision to mark them with favor.

Are there lessons in these stories from the Scriptures for us today about how we view and act toward those who may be numbered amongst the despised, the outcasts, the different, those who are not like us? May we claim that our compassion is godly, if it is offered with conditions attached?

Thanks to Cathy for the link.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, MY CANADIAN FRIENDS!!

BONNE ACTION DE GRÂCE, MES AMIS CANADIENS!!

From B4tea:

Thanksgiving Day in Canada has been celebrated since 1957, on the second Monday of October. It is a chance to give thanks for good harvest and other fortunes in the past year for the people. People have a day off work on this day, though perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is identified as a secular holiday now. Many stores and other organizations and businesses are also closed on this day.

Canadians eat their Thanksgiving meal with turkey and mashed potatoes and other meal such as pumpkin, corn ears and pecan nuts. At this time of year, a common image is seen of a cornucopia, or horn, filled with seasonal fruit and vegetables.

The Thanksgiving weekend is a well-liked time to take a short autumn vacation. Many other popular activities are also done including outdoor breaks to admire the spectacular colors of the Canadian autumn; hiking; and fishing. While who are the Fans of the teams in the Canadian Football League may expend their part of the weekend watching the Thanksgiving Day Classic matches.

TWO EXCELLENT SERMONS FOR 10-10-10

The preachers both speak of punch lines from stories from Scripture, having to do with foreigners, stories which were shocking in their own time.

For no particular reason, starting with Caminante, who preaches from the story of the healing of the ten lepers. (Luke 17:11-19)

The gospel has saved up the punch-line for this moment. In one short sentence, it informs us, ‘And he was a Samaritan.’A Samaritan.

Not only once cast out of society by virtue of his leprosy, but twice cast out because of his nationality. A doubly impure, scorned man, someone whom the boundaries would have permanently kept out.

Yet Jesus ministers to this man with the same grace as he has to the other nine. Moreover, he tells the Samaritan something he does not tell the other nine: ‘Your faith has made you well.’ A stronger translation is, ‘Your faith has brought you salvation.'

And the sermon titled "Shame On You" by Tobias Haller at In a Godward Direction on his sermon blog. Tobias preaches from the story of Ruth and Naomi (Ruth 1:(1-7)8-19a) and from the story of the ten lepers. (Luke 17:11-19)

On Ruth, the Moabite, who follows her mother-in-law back to Judah after both have become widows.

Ruth does in the end discover a distant relative of her late husband; she finds Boaz, who because of Ruth’s loyalty to him and to Naomi marries her. She bears him a son — and that son, it turns out right at the end of the story, is none other than the grandfather of King David!

Imagine how that punch-line must have sounded in the ears of proud Judeans: David’s great-grandmother was an immigrant Moabite — a foreign-born member of one of Israel’s ancestral enemies. For Moabites had once long before treated the wandering Israelites themselves as lower than dirt and wouldn’t let them so much as set a foot in Moab on their roundabout way to the promised land; and in latter days the songs of Israel would declare, “Moab is my washbasin” — and yet here it turns out that our greatest hero, David the King, David the Deliverer, is part Moabite, and wouldn’t even have been born at all had it not been for the loyalty of a woman of Moab, Ruth, in not turning back from Naomi. And perhaps a feeling of shame might rise in the heart of any Israelite who had ever mistreated a foreigner.

Of course, I urge you to read both sermons in their entirety. The sermons serve us well as they point us toward an examination of our present attitudes and actions toward not just immigrants, but all those in our society who are viewed as different, other, not like us.

STORY OF THE DAY - BACKUP PLAN

Sometimes I think we should bury all
our money in a hole & go back to
enjoying life again, he said. It'd
probably be a good idea to make a map
of where the hole was just in case it
didn't work out though.

From StoryPeople.

AN OVERDOSE OF CUTE

I'M SO CUTE, THEY WONT MIND IF I SHRED THIS!!

 

WHAT PART OF QUIET DIDN'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!

 

OK, NOW DON'T MOVE FOR ABOUT A WEEK!

 

SORRY MOM, I'M NEW AT THIS!



I REALLY NEED TO GET GOING, BUT JUST CAN'T SEEM TO GET MOTIVATED....

All together now, AWWWWW!!!

Thanks to Doug.

PLEASE PRAY FOR CATHY

From Cathy, my good and faithful friend and travel companion:

By the way, Mimi, I was wondering if you would mind adding me to your prayer list, just because I feel rather unwell? I have been getting a nagging pain in the left side on and off for a few years now. I did get examined for it (ultrasound etc, and they put some tubing with a camera on it into my stomach to check it out), and they couldn't find anything, but it is getting worse, I think, and my digestive system is increasingly going haywire for no really good reason. I need to get it checked out again. It feels as if there is some kind of blockage or problem in my gut somewhere. I am a little worried. In fact if you wouldn't mind posting a prayer request at Wounded Bird I would be immensely grateful.

O God, the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers: Mercifully accept our prayers, and grant to your servant Cathy the help of your power, that her sickness may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

BUT IS IT TRUE?

From the New York Times:

Millions of the moviegoers who made “The Social Network” the top box-office draw of the weekend saw an unflattering portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook.

To many viewers, Mr. Zuckerberg comes off as a callow, socially inept schemer who misled fellow students who had wanted to build an online social network at Harvard and who also pushed out a co-founder of the company. With only a few exceptions — girlfriends and a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm — the names have not been changed to mask identities.

The film’s truthfulness, however, has been strongly questioned in forums like Slate, the online magazine, and The New Republic.

According to the articles in Slate and The New Republic, the movie is inaccurate in its portrayal of Zuckerberg, Harvard, and the founding of Facebook. People who know Mark Zuckerberg personally agree.

And that raises a question: how can filmmakers take liberties with the story of a living person, and does that person have any recourse if the portrayal upsets him? After all, many movies run a legal disclaimer in the credits that says, “Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”
....

When it comes to public figures, lawyers say, appropriating someone’s life story for a movie is not so different from telling such details in a news article or printed biography. Politicians have grown used to harsh onscreen treatment, having learned that there is a degree of latitude for inaccuracy and strong protection against libel suits.

Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, said that if Mr. Zuckerberg sued and was declared a public figure, he would then “have to show that the filmmakers knew the statements were false, or were reckless about the possibility of falsehood.”

In the Slate article, Nathan Heller, who attended Harvard at the same as Zuckerberg and was acquainted with him, is disappointed in "The Social Network":

The Social Network I saw was a rote and deeply mediocre film, much weaker than the best work of its writer or director. How could I, who should have been sucked deep into that on-screen universe (Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first people I met in college; we lived a couple of rooms apart as freshmen), feel so impervious to the movie's "emblematic" pull?

Of Zuckerberg, Heller says:

There was a sense in 2002 and 2003, in other words, that as a group of people on the verge of cultural maturity, we had little of our own with which to lay claim to the moment—besides, maybe, the social bonds and shorthand that arose from all being in this place together. That is the real beginning of Facebook's rise and the useful measure of Mark Zuckerberg's brilliance. What's often overlooked in recent talk of the Facebook founder's "robot" stiffness or bizarre, officious ideas about online privacy is what a canny and receptive cultural reader he was.

Heller should know. And my concerns about online privacy at Facebook are antediluvian, if not worse. And here I thought I was one of the elders who was keeping up. Good-bye to all that.

Lawrence Lessig, at The New Republic says:

In 2009, Aaron Sorkin (“Sports Night,” “The West Wing”) got (yes, the same word) the idea to write a script for a movie about this new social network. Here’s the important point: He made it. As with every one of his extraordinary works, Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”

Was I so affected by the movie because I share somewhat in Sorkin's self-congratulatory contempt of Facebook? Because I view the website through the eyes of the old?

Why am I giving so much time and thought to the movie? Why do I continue to bang on about it on my blog? Am I obsessed? I confess that I don't know. I know one thing. I'm still a presence on Facebook, but I don't quite approve of my being there. The website is useful for keeping in touch with family members and friends, but there is something that I truly dislike about Facebook, and seeing the movie played into that antipathy.

And it's a little disturbing for me to find myself out of sync with 500 billion people, with 1/14 of the population of the entire world.

Photo of the real Mark Zuckerberg from Wikipedia.