WTF – Judge Walker Says “LET THEM GET MARRIED”!

UPDATE!!! Gay marriages resume on the 18th OFWHOTHEFUCKKNOWS?!

Naturally I say…LET THEM EAT CAKE!

Its official people! Gay people can now get married again in California, however, due to the fact that the 9th circuit could ban it temporarily at any time, my advice would be to…

RUN TO THAT FUCKING ALTER RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

I expect some wedding invites STAT! lol

Read Full Post »

WTF – Judge Refuses To Dismiss Gay Marriage Ban Lawsuit!

Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization Of Marriage must be PISSED!

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge challenged the backers of California’s voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday to explain how allowing gay couples to wed threatens conventional unions, a demand that prompted their lawyer to acknowledge he did not know.

The unusual exchange between U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker and Charles Cooper, a lawyer for the group that sponsored Proposition 8, came during a hearing on a lawsuit challenging the measure as discriminatory under the U.S. Constitution.

Cooper had asked Walker to throw out the suit or make it more difficult for those civil rights claims to prevail.

The judge not only refused but signaled that when the case goes to trial in January, he expects Cooper and his legal team to present evidence showing that male-female marriages would be undermined if same-sex marriages were legal.

The question is relevant to the assertion by gay marriage opponents that Proposition 8 is constitutionally valid because it furthers the state’s goal of fostering “naturally procreative relationships,” Walker explained.

“What is the harm to the procreation purpose you outlined of allowing same-sex couples to get married?” Walker asked.

“My answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know,” Cooper answered.

Moments later, after assuring the judge his response did not mean Proposition 8 was doomed to be struck down, Cooper tried to clarify his position. The relevant question was not whether there is proof that same-sex unions jeopardize marriages between men and women, but whether “the state is entitled, when dealing with radical proposals to make changes to bedrock institutions such as this … to take a wait and see attitude,” he said.

“There are things we can’t know, that’s my point,” Cooper said. “The people of California are entitled to step back and let the experiment unfold in Massachusetts and other places, to see whether our concerns about the health of marital unions have either been confirmed or perhaps they have been completely assuaged.”

Walker pressed on, asking again for specific “adverse consequences” that could follow expanding marriage to include same-sex couples. Cooper cited a study from the Netherlands, where gay marriage is legal, showing that straight couples were increasingly opting to become domestic partners instead of getting married.

“Has that been harmful to children in the Netherlands? What is the adverse effect?” Walker asked.

Cooper said he did not have the facts at hand.

“But it is not self-evident that there is no chance of any harm, and the people of California are entitled not to take the risk,” he said.

“Since when do Constitutional rights rest on the proof of no harm?” Walker parried, adding the First Amendment right to free speech protects activities that many find offensive, “but we tolerate those in a free society.”

Walker made clear that he wants to examine other issues that are part of the political rhetoric surrounding same-sex marriage but rarely surface in courtrooms. Among the questions he plans to entertain at the trial are whether sexual orientation is a fixed or immutable characteristic, whether gays are a politically powerful group, and if same-sex marriage bans such as Proposition 8 were motivated by anti-gay bias.

The lawsuit over which Walker is presiding was brought by two unmarried same-sex couples. They have since been joined by lawyers for the city of San Francisco.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was named as a defendant, has taken the rare step of agreeing with the plaintiffs instead of arguing to uphold the voter-approved law.

In allowing the case to move forward, Walker said significant questions remain about whether the California measure, which was approved by 52 percent of voters in November, unlawfully violates the rights of gays and lesbians to equality and due process guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. The measure overturned a state Supreme Court ruling earlier in the year that legalized same-sex marriages.

An estimated 18,000 gay couples wed before the law took effect. In May, the Supreme Court declined to invalidate Proposition 8 but upheld the existing same-sex marriages.

Chad Griffin, a Los Angeles political consultant who spearheaded the lawsuit, said after Wednesday’s hearing that he was thrilled by Walker’s ruling, “which brings us one step closer to the beginning of a federal trial where we will be able to prove the unconstitutionality of Prop. 8.”

Cooper said he, too, would be ready to address the issues Walker outlined, though he declined to comment on the grilling by the judge.

“We all heard it, and we haven’t had the benefit of reviewing it,” he said.

Andy Pugno, general counsel to the coalition of religious and social conservative groups behind Proposition 8, said that after losing the election, supporters of same-sex marriage were trying to persuade the judge to substitute their views for those expressed by voters.

“What really is happening is the voters who passed Proposition 8 are essentially on trial in this case, and they continue to be accused of being irrational and bigoted for restoring the traditional definition of marriage,” he said.

Read Full Post »

WTF – Church Boycotts Pepsi For Pro-Gay Stances!

BUY PEPSI PEOPLE!

Churchgoers in Florida have launched a campaign to boycott Pepsi for its support of gay rights, including its donations to the fight against Proposition 8.

<!– videos aren't worked out yet this is Phase 2

May be a screen capture JPG that links to the video player, or an embedded video from an external source like YouTube.com

May be a screen capture JPG that links to the video player, or an embedded video from an external source like YouTube.com

–>

Churchgoers in Tampa Bay, Fla., are being urged to boycott Pepsi to protest the corporation’s donations to gay advocacy organizations and “acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.”

Terry Kemple, president of the Community Issues Council, a right-wing Christian activist organization, wants to send a retaliatory message to Pepsi and its subsidiaries, which include Gatorade, Tropicana, Frito-Lay, and Quaker, according to WTSP-TV .

“[Kemple] said the company donated more than a million dollars to organizations that fought California’s gay marriage–banning Proposition 8,” reported WTSP-TV. “He also says the Pepsi Corporation has sponsored gay pride events and commercials that accept cross-dressing and homosexuality.”

Kemple reportedly also convinced his megachurch, the Bell Shoals Baptist Church, to remove its 10 Pepsi machines and replace them with vending machines from Coke.

Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, called the boycott “offensive” and “embarrassing,” noting that Coke, like Pepsi, supports full equality.

Source

Read Full Post »

WTF – Mexican Drug Cartels Target Mormons!

I just HAD to post this! And here was me thinking drug cartels are all bad!

COLONIA LEBARON, Mexico – Mormon pioneer Alma Dayer LeBaron had a vision when he moved his breakaway sect of polygamists to this valley 60 years ago: His many children would live in peace and prosperity among the pretty pecan orchards they would plant in the desert.

Prosperity has come, but the peace has been shattered.

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government’s war with the drug cartels. //

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teen-age brother from a family ranch in May.

Amid the blood and mesquite at the site of his last breath, Benjamin LeBaron’s killers posted a sign that read: “This is for the leaders of LeBaron who didn’t believe and who still don’t believe.”

“We’re living in a war zone, but it’s a war zone with little kids running all around in the yard,” said Julian LeBaron, a brother of the slain leader. Like most members of the Mormon enclave, he has dual Mexican-American citizenship and speaks Spanish and English fluently.

These Mormons, some who swear and drink beer, are the latest collateral damage in the Mexican government’s U.S.-backed war against criminal organizations.

Here in Chihuahua, the border state south of Texas and New Mexico, conditions are rapidly deteriorating. The violence has left more than 1,000 dead in Ciudad Juarez this year, even though the government has sent 10,000 troops and police officers into the city.

Increasingly the violence is moving from the big cities into the small, usually placid farm towns of the rugged desert mountains. Criminal bands have ambushed the governor’s convoy along the highway, and they have assassinated local police at stop lights and political leaders at will. Gunmen executed the mayor of Namiquipa last week.

“The northeast of Chihuahua is now a zone of devastation,” said Victor Quintana, a state lawmaker, who reports an exodus of business people fleeing kidnappers and farmers refusing to plant their crops because of extortion.

The columnist Alberto Aziz Nassif wrote in El Universal newspaper, “Chihuahua today is the emblem of a failed state, run by incompetent authorities who have little ability to protect the citizens.”

Many of the Mormons have fled north to the United States, and Julian LeBaron said he fears for his life. He has reason. In Ciudad Juarez, a three-hour drive to the north, hand-painted banners were hung from overpasses last week threatening the extended clan.

“All we want to do is live in peace. We want nothing to do with the drug cartels. They can’t be stopped. What we want is just to protect ourselves from being kidnapped and killed,” said Marco LeBaron, a college student who came home for the funeral of his brother, the slain anti-crime activist. Marco LeBaron is one of 70 Mormons who have volunteered to join a rural police force to protect the town. The Mexican government has given them permission to arm themselves.

For all the violence swirling around them, the Mormons have mostly stayed out of the fight. Their ancestors first settled in Mexico in the 1880s, during the reign of dictator Porfirio Diaz, who offered the religious outcasts refuge from the harassment and prosecution they faced in the United States for their polygamist lifestyles. Some men in Colonia LeBaron and surrounding towns continue to follow what early Mormon prophets called “the Principle,” marrying multiple wives and having dozens of children, though the custom here is fading. Polygamy was banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the official Mormon Church, in 1890.

The Mormon community based in Colonia LeBaron, numbering about 1,000, has one motel, two grocery stores and lots of schools. There are no ATMs and no liquor sales. Many Mormons are conspicuous not only for their straw-colored hair and pale skin, but also for their new pickup trucks, large suburban-style homes with green front lawns, and big tracts of land for their pecans and cattle. They are wealthy, by the standards of their poor Mexican neighbors. Most of the Mormon men make their money working construction jobs in the United States; a young Mormon might work 10 years hanging drywall in Las Vegas before he has enough money to buy a plot of land to start his own pecan orchard here.

The Mormons were dragged into the drug fight on May 2, when 16-year-old Eric LeBaron and a younger brother were hauling a load of fence posts in their truck to their father’s ranch in the Sierra Madre. According to the family’s account, five armed men seized Eric and told his brother to run home and tell his father to answer the telephone. When the kidnappers called, they told Joel LeBaron that if he ever wanted to see Eric again, he must pay them $1 million.

The next day, 150 men gathered at the church house in Colonia LeBaron to debate what to do. They had no confidence in the local police. One of their members, Ariel Ray, the mayor of nearby Galeana, reminded them that someone had put an empty coffin in the bed of his pickup. Some men argued that they should hire professional bounty hunters from the United States to get Eric back. Others wanted to form a posse.

“But we knew the last thing we could do was give them the money, or we would be invaded by this scum,” Julian LeBaron said.

Another brother, Craig LeBaron, told the Deseret News in Salt Lake City: “If you give them a cookie, they’ll want a glass of milk. If we don’t make a stand here, it’s only a matter of time before it’s my kid.”

A caravan of hundreds of the LeBaron Mormons, along with Mennonites and others, went to the state capital to protest the crime. This kind of public advocacy is almost unheard of among the Mexican Mormons, who keep to themselves. Led by Benjamin LeBaron, the protesters met with the governor and state attorney general, who quickly dispatched helicopters, police and soldiers to the area. The government forces erected roadblocks and searched the countryside.

Eric LeBaron was freed eight days after his abduction. His kidnappers simply told him to go home. But soon after, another member of the community, Meredith Romney, a 72-year-old bishop related to former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was taken captive. The state governor sent Colombian security consultants to LeBaron. The Mormons, led by an increasingly public and outspoken Benjamin LeBaron, formed a group called SOS Chihuahua to organize citizens to defend themselves, report crimes and demand results from authorities. LeBaron was featured prominently in the local media. He gave a speech to a graduating class of police cadets. He staged rallies. He got noticed.

Early on July 7, four trucks loaded with men passed through a highway tollbooth, where they were recorded on videotape outside Galeana, where Benjamin LeBaron lived in a sprawling, new stucco home with his wife and five young children. Two trucks stopped at the cemetery outside town and waited. Two pickup trucks filled with 15 to 20 heavily armed men, wearing helmets, bulletproof vests and blue uniforms, came for LeBaron.

They smashed in his home’s windows and shouted for him to open the door, as his terrified children cried inside, according to an account given by his brothers. LeBaron’s brother-in-law Luis Widmar, 29, who lived across the street, heard the commotion and ran to his aid. Both men were beaten by the gunmen, who threatened to rape LeBaron’s wife in front of her children unless the men revealed where LeBaron kept his arsenal of weapons.

“But he didn’t have any, because I promise you, if he did, he would have used them to protect his family,” Julian LeBaron said.

LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head outside town. A banner was hung beside their bodies that blamed them for the arrest of 25 gunmen who were seized in June after terrorizing the town of Nicolas Bravo, where they burned down buildings and extorted from business owners. According to Mexican law enforcement officials, the gunmen are members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting the Juarez cartel for billion-dollar cocaine-smuggling routes into El Paso.

After the men killed LeBaron and Widmar, a video camera captured their departure at the highway tollbooth – the make, model and year of their vehicles and the license numbers, according to family members. There have been no arrests.

Who killed Benji LeBaron – and why? These questions are difficult to answer in Mexico’s drug war, and the unknowns fuel the fear of those left in Colonia LeBaron.

The state attorney general, Patricia Gonzalez, blamed the group La Linea, the Line, the armed enforcement wing of former police officers and gunmen that works for the Juarez cartel. A few months ago, Gonzalez said La Linea was an exhausted remnant of dead-enders whose ranks had been decimated by infighting and arrests.

After Gonzalez said the Juarez cartel was responsible for the killings, banners appeared in Ciudad Juarez that read: “Mrs. Prosecutor, avoid problems for yourself, and don’t blame La Linea.” The message stated that the LeBaron killings were the work of the Sinaloa cartel. On Wednesday, another banner was hung from an overpass, suggesting that Benji LeBaron was a thief: “Ask yourself where did all his properties come from?”

At the LeBaron funeral, attended by more than 2,000 people, including the Chihuahua state governor and attorney general, Benji’s uncle Adrian LeBaron said, “The men who murdered them have no children, no parents, no mother. They are the spawn of evil.”

Read Full Post »

WTF – Catholics OUTSPENT The Mormons – Prop 8!

And heres another church that should lose its tax excemption status!

The conservative evangelical Focus on the Family, which fights LGBT issues across the country, gave $657,000 in money and services.

The amounts vastly surpass the $189,000 in direct cash and compensated staff time from the Mormon church.

The new figures were turned over to the state weeks into an investigation by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission that institutional donors to ProtectMarriage, the umbrella group behind Proposition 8, had not reported the value of workers salaries and other expenses.

In November, Californians Against Hate filed a complaint with the Commission accusing the Church of Latter Day Saints of failing to report the value of work it did to support Prop 8. An investigation began in late November into the Mormon contributions and those of other groups.

Proposition 8 was approved by 52 percent of voters. Following passage of the proposition the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the vote.  They were joined by additional suits by the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court said it would hear oral arguments in the case on March 5.

The lawsuits charge that Proposition 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution’s core commitment to equality for everyone, by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group – lesbian and gay Californians.

They also say that Proposition 8 improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities. The suits say that under the California Constitution, such radical changes to the organizing principles of state government cannot be made by simple majority vote through the initiative process, but instead must, at a minimum, go through the state legislature first.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown is also asking the Court to invalidate Proposition 8 on the ground that certain fundamental rights, including the right to marry, are inalienable and can not be put up for a popular vote.

Source

Read Full Post »

WTF – The Mormons Lied (like duuuhh)!

Oh and we are so not surprised. When Latter Day Saints took on the gays, we vowed revenge, and when you bite the gays the gays don’t just bite back, we bite and remove a chunk or flesh.

After the passing of proposition 8 in California, the Mormons were subjected to scrutiny, and rightly so because their Tax Exempt status was at risk, and if you thought it was at risk before…now its REALLY at risk.

(San Francisco, California) Six weeks into an investigation by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the Church of Latter-Day Saints has admitted that it spent nearly $188,000 more on the campaign to approve Proposition 8 that it had initially stated.

The Mormon Church previously insisted that it spent only $2,078 to support the ban on same-sex marriage, something LGBT leaders said was implausible in light of a number of visits to California by high ranking church officials, ads allegedly produced with church funds and the large number of church staffers working on the campaign.

In November, Californians Against Hate filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission accusing the church of failing to report the value of work it did to support Prop 8.

An investigation began in late November.

In a new filing with the state, the church now admits that among other expenses were $96,849 for “compensated staff time” for church employees who worked on the campaign, $20,575 for the use of facilities and equipment at its Salt Lake City headquarters, $26,000 for audio-visual production and travel expenses for church leaders to go to California.

“This is exactly what we were talking about when we filed the suit,” Fred Karger of Californians Against Hate told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Church put an estimated $25 million into the battle to end gay marriage in California.

If the Commission finds the Church broke state election laws it could be fined up to $5,000 per violation. The Commission also could file an additional civil lawsuit.

There have been protests at Mormon churches in California and Utah. In Utah, a number of churches were vandalized and hoax mailings containing a white powder were sent to Church leaders in Salt Lake City. No group has claimed responsibility, but some LDS officials have accused gays.

Later this year, the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case seeking to nullify Proposition 8, which overruled the court’s decision in May legalizing gay marriage.

Last week in a separate case, a federal judge has denied a request by supporters of Prop 8 to keep secret the names of donors. The group behind the measure said public disclosure of their financial supporters put the donors at risk of personal harassment or boycotts to their businesses.

In denying the motion, the judge said the public had a right to know who gave money to state ballot measures.

Read Full Post »