News reports, reminding us why Interweave is important

June 28, 2007 - Three former leaders of ex-gay ministry apologize
LA Times
They cite psychological harm they caused gays as the ministry, Exodus
International, meets in Irvine.
Three former leaders of Exodus International, often described as the nation's largest ex-gay ministry, publicly apologized Wednesday for the harm they said their efforts had caused many gays and lesbians who believed the group's message that sexual orientation could be changed through prayer...

April 18, 2007 - The Real Sodomites by Scott Horton
Harper's Magazine
>>> ...The key [part] of his presentation focused on the story of Sodom - the cataclysmic tale of destruction, in which the Lord destroys the offending city after ascertaining that there were not ten righteous humans in it (Abraham had famously bargained Him down from fifty). The idea of the "chosen" and the notion of a genocidal act - the destruction of a whole people - being divinely justified are among the elements of the Old Testament that have historically given trouble to ethicists. Reform Judaism has, said the rabbi, tended to push these accounts to the margins. Conversely, the curious theology of some in the American Religious Right affords them center stage.
>>>For English speakers, of course, the word "sodomite" has long passed as a somewhat archaic expression for "homosexual." But this rests on the mistranslation of two words (yadha and anashim) from the biblical texts made by the early seventeenth century scholars appointed by King James. (As another rabbi friend recently told me, he has a standard practice for avoiding conflict with the followers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and it usually starts this way: "Let's consult the original Hebrew, shall we?") This Reform interpretation is slowly emerging as the view of the mainstream Protestants, who by and large now accept that the two offending words in the King James Bible are the result of a mistranslation, or at least a highly suspect translation. What the rabbi offered in parsing the text was the same analysis I heard last year from a group Presbyterian theologians - namely, the Lord's decision to smite the Sodomites had little to do with sexual orientation and much to do with mistreatment of visitors and injustice. Rather the accent in these texts falls on the quality of hospitality that the Sodomites offered to the Israelites, which was to say, nothing we would recognize as hospitality, and even more fundamentally, their corrupted sense of justice. Recall the account of a man who entered the town with money seeking to buy food, but who was denied food by all whom he approached. When at length he succumbed to starvation, the Sodomites took his money. And when one among them complained of the injustice of what was done, they slew the complainer as well. Abraham reminds us that we are simple stuff - dust and ashes. But in each of the Abrahamic faiths the divine potential of man is recognized, the potential of a man who does justice and lives righteously.
>>>And in the end, righteousness is inextricably connected to justice - to the command to treat our fellow man with dignity and respect. The Religious Right ... corrupts these texts into a sense of a God who picks and chooses among the races and peoples of the earth, whose violent acts reflect a preference for one people over another and an indifference to the virtue of the individual. Their tendency to degrade the account of Sodom and Gomorrah into a condemnation of homosexuality is a good demonstration of just that.
>>> But the rabbi made a powerful point. And we should all ask ourselves, who are the Sodomites in our own society today? The Sodomites exist in all times and in all societies. They are not those who have a different sexual orientation. They are those among us who have a corrupted sense of justice, who demonize and abuse the outsider, who pronounce righteous pieties but whose conduct reflects a thorough contempt for one of the most fundamental lessons of scripture: of the sanctity of human life and our responsibility to treat all our fellow humans with dignity and respect. They are all about us and unless we remain ever conscious, they are within us as well.

August 2006 - Homophobia
>>> For those not familiar with the story, in Meade, Kansas, a B&B owner had received a gift from his  son of a rainbow flag.  It had nothing to do with being gay, but was a sign of hope, a sort of an Over the Rainbow gesture.  The child had gone to live with relatives in California and wanted to let them know he missed them and looked forward to his return. The father hung that flag outside his business, and that is when the harassment began.  He has been approached by churches, citizens etc to take it down, and harassed because he refused to do so. Since the news that someone cut down the rainbow flag in the middle of the night hit the media, the family has been swamped with emails, replacement rainbow flags, and people have even booked rooms with no intent of staying there to make up for any loss of business they might have sustained. This family, with no connection to the gay community, has seen the ugly underside of homophobia.  http://tinyurl.com/lwcuu