Rainbow Wings

It was time to upgrade my server, and I decided that in the process of moving my site I'd switch from WordPress to Drupal. I looked around a bit and found the Wordpress Import module, which made my migration extremely simple.

I picked up this coffee table book on a sale table a few months ago. It's from the 90s, so it's been out a while, but I hadn't seen it before. Long Road to Freedom: the Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement is a year-by-year history of events related to the queer civil rights movement, from 1967-1992, as reported in The Advocate magazine. It's a mostly journalistic, occasionally campy look at history from a queer perspective, which is very different from the "mainstream" journalism of the time.

ABCNews Story Mary Lambert, an 81-year-old Sunday school teacher, was fired from her church after more than 50 years of teaching, ABC reports. One of the reasons the pastor cited was a passage from I Timothy, ""I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent."

Violence escalated today in Israel and Lebanon, with rocket attacks against Israel and missle attacks against Beruit. This marks the fourth day of increasing violence in this most recent exchange of attacks. Check out "Al Jazeera":jazeera or "Reuters":reuters for more details. At this point I see little hope for a non-violent resolution to the conflicts in the Middle East. US support of Israel leaves little room for a genuine position at the table for the other parties in the region.

I'm at the Baptist Peace Fellowship Summer Conference in Atlanta this week, and have had the privelege to worship twice at [Ebenezer Baptist Church][ebenezer] , the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up and was copastor during his period of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement.

Wednesday the US Senate voted down a move to break the filibuster on the Gay Marriage Amendment (see the "Congressional Record":loc). With the successful filibuster the Democrats have prevented the bill from passing this session, and from getting onto the ballot this year.

DC Comics is releasing a new Batwoman storyline in its title 52 in which Kathy Kane (aka Batwoman) is a lipstick lesbian socialite.

Clergy for Fairness announced on May 22 that they are organizing a petition drive against the Federal Marriage Amendment, set for a vote in the Senate the week of June 5.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to veto a bill requiring equal coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered history in California textbooks if it makes it to his desk.

The Washington Blade posted an article Friday with comments from Democratic Party Treasurer Andy Tobias, the Dems "highest-ranking openly gay official", according to the Blade. Tobias' comments are a followup to Dem Party Chair Howard Dean's comments on the 700 club, where Dean stated that the Democratic Party platform calls for leaving marriage as a union between a man and a woman.