See you tonight! Please wear blue, & your Equality Works button.
I exhausted myself a couple of nights ago, & if there’s one thing I’ve learned about me & exhaustion: I’ve gotta take care of it first, before I can take care of anything else. And so for the last couple of nights, instead of blogging, I got sleep.
And now: tonight’s the night. Which all our pals in the progressive blogger community have been also reminding us. My thanks to them for standing up for us. Here’s some of the more recent posts of support:
- Open Thread – Reminder About Meeting Tonight! (The Mudflats) — includes a lovely, if semi-blurry, photo of Equality Works’ spokesperson Jackie Buckley with Mudflats mascot Brian the Moose. Mudflats posts are always a pleasure, too, for all the wonderful comments from mudpuppies from all over the place.
- It’s only natural…help protect our LGBT friends from discrimination in Anchorage (Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis). Linda Kellen Biegel stood up for us in 1992-93, too, & got her tires slashed as a result. Linda writes about a recent story about some gay penguins that adopted an orphan penguin, and she went on to say What struck me so hard about this is that I’ve known so many human LGBT couples who have done exactly the same thing. These couples through foster care and adoption programs have picked up tattered children, abused and thrown away by their heterosexual families, and put them back together with love and respect.Yes, in fact that’s exactly what my partner and I did for my partner’s nephew. It’s so good to be acknowledged for that. Thanks. I’m guessing that we will hear from some of those children-turned-adults tomorrow at the Assembly testimony for the Ordinance against discrimination based on sexual orientation. I hope so. My kid’s unfortunately too far away to take part — working the summer at Denali Park — but I know he’ll be thinking of us
- LEGISLATING HATE: The Real Anti-Christ (Shannyn Moore: Just a Girl from Homer) — Shannyn’s scathing criticism of the hatred-disguised-as-Christianity of the Anchorage Baptist Temple’s Jerry Prevo and the Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla’s pastor Ron Hamman, and others of their ilk.
- My pastors are mightier than Prevo (Alaska Dispatch) — Amanda Coyne talks about her pastors, John Carey and Dianne O’Connell of Immanuel Presbyterian Church: an altogether different brand of Christianity than that espoused by Prevo and Hamman. I’m not a member, but I’ve been to this church and know these people, and Amanda describes it just as I know it: Lights don’t flash, bass doesn’t boom and hands aren’t raised during prayer. And those prayers more often than not, are about bad knees, or about a recent heart operation. At Immanuel, we don’t get a lot about fire and brimstone. We do get a lot about doing the very difficult, about the very mundane acts of looking after your neighbor, of treating people as you would have them treat you.
- The Accidental Answer (The Alaska Commons) — John Aronno’s meditation on the truth about “storms” — and the importance of equality. (John and his fiancee Heather are behind SOSAnchorage.net — which factchecks the Prevo church-fundraising-through-homophobia site of similar name.)
Thank you, friends. I’ll see you there.
