Mika and I went to the Keg restaurant with our good friends Jason and Fran to celebrate Mika’s 40th birthday. Two happy couples getting together to celebrate a milestone in Mika’s life. Mika and I are in our 15th year together and life is great!
Video produced and published by Geoffrey
Tap, tap, tap is the gesture Shane Bitney Crone and Thomas Lee Bridegroom, a young gay couple, devised to show affection in public without revealing they were gay. As the day draws nearer to the premiere screening of Bridegroom: A Love Story, Unequaled, at the Tribeca Film Festival, April 23, 2013, more details, including this one, of their life together are coming to light. The more I learn about them, the more I recognize the similarities in my own life. The struggle for acceptance they experienced is all too familiar. Shane disclosed in an interview that both he and Tom “tried to pray the gay away. We tried to ignore our feelings and our natural attractions, to fight biology and live by society’s “norms.” But it just isn’t possible.”(Huffpost) When I read these words, it struck a chord. I was astonished. This is exactly how I felt during my adolescence in the latter half of the 1970s when gay liberation was just getting underway. It was a very lonely time for me, as there were no gay youth groups and homosexuality was still largely condemned as unnatural, immoral, disgusting, etc. In spite of the negative attitudes against homosexuality prevalent at the time, feelings of same sex attraction were manifesting themselves in me and I was horrified. I tried to ignore them. At the time people said it was a phase, a symptom of adolescence, of raging hormones and the like and not to worry: it would pass.
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In Canadian law, enshrined in the Constitution Act and in federal statutes, Northwest Territories Act, the Yukon Act and the Nunavut Act, what is known as separate school boards are allowed to operate along side the public school boards. The law allows for separate school boards to accommodate members of the Christian faith, either Catholic or Protestant, where their numbers make them a minority–this right does not apply to faiths outside Christianity–in the provinces of Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan and in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut. In practice, most separate school boards serve Catholic populations. Both public and separate school boards are funded by provincial an territorial governments respectively and are subject to legislation governing curriculum. While there are separate, that is Catholic, school boards in these provinces and territories, they operate under the auspices of the provincial or territorial civil authority. The Catholic Church does not have a constitutional, legal, or proprietary interest in the separate school boards. In recent history there is an ongoing controversy over Catholic teachings on homosexuality and their place in the separate school curriculum in the Province of Ontario. Continue reading
Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation on February 11, 2013. The reason he gave for reaching this decision is as follows:
in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of St Peter and proclaim the gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary. Strength which has in the past few months deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity adequately to fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.
This came as quite a surprise to me and to many other people across the world. It is commonly understood that once elected pope, the holder stays in office for life. While I am no longer a practicing Roman Catholic, I am interested in the Church, its history, doctrines and current theological discussions. Continue reading
If the ignorant were truly blessed, I swear this man, Charles L. Worley, Pastor of the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina, would be a living saint. He earned his fifteen minutes of infamy in 2012 when in addressing his flock he made the following comment:
I had a way, I’ve figured a way out. A way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn’t get it past the Congress. Build a great big large fence, 150 or 100 miles long, put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified till they can’t get out. Feed them. And you know what? In a few years they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.
My immediate reaction upon coming across this story was a belly laugh. Is it really possible that someone could be so bloody ignorant? Beyond that, I was torn between feelings of hoping this man does humanity a favour in not reproducing and hoping if he does breed, one or more of his children are lesbian and homosexual. Seriously, I think it better that he not breed or at least that any progeny he has are heterosexual, because the thought of gay children having this man as their father is just too horrifying. Continue reading
Knox, a nondescript town located in the northwest corner of the state in Starke County, Indiana with a population of 3704 souls became the focal point in hard lesson of life for me. Knox is well represented with churches, primarily Protestant denominations including Pentecostal, Baptist and various semi-independent Evangelical sects. While Knox is well outside the Bible Belt, the religious culture is very much like that you will find there. This is particularly so with regard to attitudes toward homosexuality. Generally speaking, it is a religious culture in which homosexuality is neither accepted nor tolerated. You may be wondering how it is that I came to know about and am so interested in Knox, Indiana and its religious culture. The reason, in short, is that Knox is the birthplace of Thomas Lee Bridegroom, a young gay man whose life and untimely death I learned of in a youtube video published by his grieving partner Shane Bitney Crone. It could happen to you is the video Shane published in memory of his partner Thomas Lee Bridegroom. Continue reading
Geoffrey & Mika 