The story in Rolling Stone about homeless gay teens is a real gut punch, also, YES:
“LGBT advocacy groups don’t want to talk about religion,” says Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith in America. “One, they don’t want to come across as anti-religion. And two, they just aren’t familiar with it. But the number-one hurdle to LGBT equality is religious based bigotry. The face of the gay-rights movement shouldn’t be what I call ’40-year-old well-moisturized couples.’ The face of the gay-rights movement should be a 15-year-old kid that’s been thrown out of his house and taught that he’s a sinner.”
Well, that’s fantastic for Detroit.
I’m pretty sure that the take-home from this story is “desperate people, do not take your bleeding, cramping female friend or relative to the hospital, because it’s 1954 and you or they will go to jail.”
Catholics are totally into getting it right, but MAN do their schools fire some pregnant lesbians:
Mullen’s views are consistent with those held by young Catholics today. Over 70 percent of Catholics ages 18-30 agree or strongly agree that gays and lesbians should have the right to marry, while 74 percent believe same-sex female couples can raise a child as well as a male-female couple can, according to Andrew L. Whitehead, a Clemson University professor who studied General Social Survey data.
While young Catholics are especially open, American Catholics as a whole have dramatically changed their beliefs in the past 25 years. Based on Whitehead’s analysis, in 1988 only 19.3 percent of American Catholics either agreed or strongly agreed that gays and lesbians should have the right to marry. By 2012, 56.7 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that they should have the right to do so. Across all years, Catholics are more accepting of gay marriage than the general American population.
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This is not Trailer Park Boys, this is a Serious Weed Operation, man:
The size and sophistication of his fallen empire were unprecedented, those who chased him say. Starting in the mid-2000s, Mr. Cournoyer managed the shipment of man-size bales of hydroponically grown pot across the border on motorboats and snowmobiles. Nearly $1 billion of his cash was laundered through the Sinaloa drug cartel or was ferried back to Canada in pickup trucks equipped with secret traps in their radios and gas tanks.
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I hope he goes the fuck to jail for a long time:
By allegedly focusing on poor black women with criminal records, Holtzclaw kept himself from being caught — until he met J.L., a black woman who was just passing through the neighborhood he patrolled. “Not only is this individual stopping women who fit a profile of members of our society who are confronted rightly or wrongly by police officers all the time,” said the prosecutor, Gieger. “He identifies a vulnerable society that without exception except one have an attitude for ‘What good is it gonna do? He’s a police officer. Who’s going to believe me?’”
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Willie Nelson is perfect:
He got a text from Annie. The bus was waiting down the hill. He needed to head to a local movie theater to make an appearance at a screening for a low-budget Austin holiday film in which he plays a Father Christmas-like figure.
“I just like to keep moving,” he said. “I could lie down and go to sleep and not go anywhere or do anything, real easy. I’m lazy. I have to make myself do it. But once I do, I’m happy.”
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I also have a lot of love in my heart for John Waters, who has NEVER steered me wrong on a book recommendation (not, like, personalized book recommendations for yours truly, just that he often mentions great books) and who is a great writer and a great interviewee:
Q. What do you like about your early films?
A. The Kennedy assassination scene in “Eat Your Makeup” is kind of ballsy. And I really give my parents credit, because we filmed it in front of their house, and there was Divine crawling out of the car in the bloody Chanel suit. And they tried to understand, and I look back on that and realize how incredibly loving that was. At the time, I didn’t realize it.
Q. Your parents were very supportive, but they never saw “Pink Flamingos,” right?
A. They never saw it. My father paid for it, and I was very touched when he died, and we went to the safe deposit box, and he had the little things I sent him from the road — $50, $100 [payback notes]. But they were also mortified. The only time they weren’t was at the opening night of “Hairspray” on Broadway, and Harvey Fierstein’s mother came to them and said, “Didn’t we raise terrific sons?” And my mother just started sobbing. That is a loaded question. Luckily I did get to tell my mom about this retrospective, and she was very proud. One lived to be 90, the other 91. They had a happy, great marriage. I don’t know why I’m so weird.
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