Camille is a twentysomething working in the LGBT nonprofit industry. She runs an LGBT news blog at gaywrites.org.
For 18 years, Kristen Ostendorf worked as a teacher at Totino-Grace High School in Minnesota in relative silence: she didn’t tell anyone that she is gay. But after she finally came out to her colleagues last month, her work at the Catholic school immediately came to an end. 43-year-old Ostendorf told the MinnPost that during a workshop of 120 teachers in late August, she blurted out, “I’m gay, I’m in a relationship with a woman, and I’m happy.” The next day she was asked to resign, having broken the Catholic school’s code of conduct barring any public speech or actions that contradict the Church’s teachings. When she refused, she was promptly fired. [Click headline for more…] Read more
This July, Bermuda passed legislation called the Human Rights Amendment Act which bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But that’s unfathomable to some religious leaders, who are pressuring the government to legalize discrimination so long as it falls under the category of “religious expression.” United for Change, a group comprised of about 80 pastors from 60 Bermuda churches, signed and publicized a statement explaining that the anti-discrimination law could adversely affect religious freedom. Their primary concerns? First, that preaching against LGBT people will constitute hate speech, and second, that this will ultimately lead to the legalization of marriage equality. And they can’t have that. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Over the course of the summer, the Catholic Jesuit order in the United States released a series of videos in which they tell LGBT people they are welcome in the church. This appears to be a recurring theme; just this week, I also posted about a new video campaign called The “Not All Like That” Christians Project in which LGBT-supportive Christians record videos basically telling LGBT people that some Christians are actually okay with gays. (The issues with that messaging are a whole other story.) This project, led by the Jesuit Ignatian News Network and officially called the “Who Are We To Judge — Gay Catholics” series, features interviews with prominent gay Catholics and supportive clergy. Here’s one example: [Click headline for more…] Read more
If you’ve ever assumed that all Christians harbor animosity toward LGBT people, this organization has a message for you. Inspired by Dan Savage’s youth-oriented It Gets Better Project, a group of Christians have launched The Not All Like That (NALT) Christians Project, a campaign where “Christians proclaim their belief in full equality.” Savage himself helped develop the campaign, along with pastor and writer John Shore and Truth Wins Out leaders Wayne Besen and Evan Hurst. Here’s their mission statement, in their own words: The purpose of the NALT Christians Project is to give LGBT-affirming Christians a means of proclaiming to the world — and especially to young gay people — their belief and conviction that there is nothing anti-biblical or at all inherently sinful about being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Like It Gets Better, the campaign will use a video-sharing platform to spread a simple message: Not all Christians are anti-gay. The campaign launched Monday with around 30 videos, mostly from allies. Here’s one example from fellow blogger Fred Clark: [Click headline for more…] Read more
More than a thousand people took to the streets in Port-au-Prince, Haiti last week to protest homosexuality and a proposed same-sex marriage bill. A Haitian gay rights group has reportedly announced a plan to introduce marriage equality legislation, but religious groups including Protestants and Muslims led Friday’s demonstration protesting the idea. Some held signs and sang songs in which they threatened to burn down the country’s Parliament if marriage equality were legalized. [Click headline for more…] Read more
