Lunchtime links: Catholic students not OK with Church gay bashing

In Minnesota, some smart Catholic school kids at Benilde-St. Margaret’s took issue with the anti-gay propaganda sent out by their archdiocese. They picked the propaganda apart in a school website editorial, which they posted alongside a personal essay by brave Benilde student Sean Simonson on what life can be like for a gay teenager. The material spurred strong comment thread reaction, much of it positive. School officials didn’t like the way things were going and deleted the editorial and the essay. So the way it is now: (1) If you’re gay or (2) if your parents are gay or (3) if you’re straight and believe gay people are entitled to equal rights and legal protection from harassment– and if you think none of those three things are wrong– then, as Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput says, Catholic School is just not for you.

The Denver Post is wrestling with the question of how to ward off content pirates. The paper had an attorney this summer argue that bloggers who want to be fully protected from lawsuits should quote not one word from the paper. Not a word. Then in a prominently placed Monday editorial notice, the paper said some people could quote a little bit from the Denver Post. The editors then acknowledged that readers might even choose to criticize material quoted from the Post. That’s “the essence of free speech in a vigorous democracy,” they wrote, as a kind of afterthought to the copyright discussion, as if one of the attorneys in the room told the newspaper editors to include that bit about not having an issue with quoting the paper in service of critical thinking and freedom of expression, just to be thorough.

“We have no issue with people who quote a small amount of a Post story so as to comment on it, perhaps even criticize us. That’s the essence of free speech in a vigorous democracy.” — Denver Post editorial board.

Tea Party candidates Ken Buck, Sharron Angle and likely Joe Miller have lost their bids to join the U.S. Senate. That’s a blow for people who believe in “Firearms Freedom Acts,” which seek to do away with gun-purchase background checks because they believe there should be no restrictions whatsoever on gun possession in the United States, as in none, because criminals, crazy people, heavy drug users, domestic abusers, all of us every one should have the constitutional unfettered right to buy any and all firearms we choose to buy.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput was not elected vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Tuesday. Members of the conference gathered in Baltimore elected New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan president and Louisville Archbishop Joseph Kurtz vice president. AP report that the outcome of the election is another sign that the bishops will take an aggressive approach to upholding Catholic orthodoxy.

Joseph Farah, editor of right-wing website WorldNetDaily (which posted an essay against bipartisanship penned by Tom Tancredo Monday) announced the “STOP AIRPORT HUMILIATION NOW” campaign against the new Transportation Security Administration airport screening rules. Farah says the Tea Party-GOP midterm electoral victories demonstrate that Americans are done with the kind of Obama administration government overreaches represented by the new airport rules.

“You would think these people in Washington didn’t notice the election results this month,” said Farah in a release. “Well, maybe they need a reminder that the people are not resting on their laurels and will not accept being treated like cattle before they get on an airplane.”

Farah says the full body computer scans “generate naked images of minor passengers [that] arguably amounts to the creation of illegal child pornography.”

[ Image via AP ]

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