Monday, August 27th, 2018
Edward Pentin, - National Catholic Register
Stephan: I have never in my life heard a senior curia official, an archbishop no less, publicly charge the Pope with dishonesty and propose he resign. The Roman Catholic Church, I think, is in very serious trouble. Chile, Pennsylvania, Ireland, the horror stories just keep piling up. The sexual dysfunctionality of the clergy is so pervasive it is an institutional crisis from which the church may never recover.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
Credit: Edward Pentin
In an extraordinary 11-page written testament, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States has accused several senior prelates of complicity in covering up Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s allegations of sexual abuse, and has claimed that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI but chose to repeal them.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2016, said that in the late 2000s, Benedict had “imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis” and that Viganò personally told Pope Francis about those sanctions in 2013.
Archbishop Viganò said in his written statement, simultaneously released to the Register and other media, (see full text below) that Pope Francis “continued to cover” for McCarrick and not only did he “not take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him” but also made McCarrick “his trusted counselor.” Viganò said that the former archbishop of Washington advised the Pope to appoint a […]
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Friday, February 9th, 2018
Keegan Hankes and Alex Amend, - Southern Poverty Law Center
Stephan: I have said this several times, because I think it is very disturbing, and on the evidence, true. You are much more likely to be hurt or killed by a cowardly White racist than you are a Muslim jihadist, and in Donald Trump's America, these boys, they're not really men emotionally, feel liberated to express their hate, and the fear that lies under it.
This is a trend only culture can change, and culture is created through the aggregate of individual choices. It is up to each of us to end this through beingness. In the
8 Laws you can find the reason I say this with confidence.
James Alex Fields (center with black shield) with Vanguard America during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called “alt-right” — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.
On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life.
At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.
But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed […]
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Saturday, December 16th, 2017
Rebecca Klein, Education Reporter - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Betsy DeVos is a nightmare, a rich, ignorant, christofascist fanatic. That she holds any government office is a horror. That she is reshaping the public education system, and university systems of the United States to the great detriment of all is a catastrophe. Yet, thanks to Trump, she is in that office and that is where we are. Here are some facts.
PORTLAND, Ore. ― It was late morning in an artsy cafe, the smell of coffee and baked goods sweetening the air, and Ashley Bishop sat at a table, recalling a time when she was taught that most of secular American society was worthy of contempt.
Growing up in private evangelical Christian schools, Bishop saw the world in extremes, good and evil, heaven and hell. She was taught that to dance was to sin, that gay people were child molesters and that mental illness was a function of satanic influence. Teachers at her schools talked about slavery as black immigration, and instructors called environmentalists “hippie witches.”
Bishop’s family moved around a lot when she was a child, but her family always enrolled her in evangelical schools.
So when Bishop left school in 2003 and entered the real world at 17, she felt like she was an alien landing on Planet Earth for the first time. Having been cut off from mainstream society, she felt unequipped to handle the job […]
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Thursday, November 23rd, 2017
ADAM SERWER, - The Atlantic
Stephan: For years I have been telling my readers that four major meta-trends that are almost never discussed as such are shaping our future:
- Being born White will no longer confer privilege;
- Being born male will no longer bestow dominance;
- Western European and North American culture values will not define how the world operates;
- The Rise of Neo-feudalism and the tansfer of real power from nation states to multinational virtual corporate states
Those trends, particularly the first two are, in my opinion, why an utterly incompetent compulsive liar, molester and psychopath like Donald Trump and his minion Mike Pence are the President and Vice President of the United States.
This piece in the
Atlantic addresses these issues head on. Must reading, I believe.
Thirty years ago, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why.
It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote. If Johnston’s Republican rival hadn’t dropped out of the race and endorsed him at the last minute, the outcome might have been different.
Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”
What message would […]
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Nina Burleigh, - The Raw Story/Newsweek
Stephan: When we changed the U.S. military from an elitist conscription model to an all-volunteer meritocracy we did not anticipate that only one percent of the population would be involved, nor that fundamentalist Christians would take over the Chaplin corps in all service branches.
This is a very alarming trend, that is getting almost no attention. When you read this piece think also of the White Supremacist Theocratic Rightist self-styled militias. America is getting very closes to civil strife.
Donald Trump’s election has led to such a steep rise in fundamentalist Christian evangelizing and religious bigotry in the U.S. armed forces that the matter is reaching the level of a “national security threat,” according to information shared exclusively with Newsweek by an organization that represents and advocates for secular and minority religious views in the military.
Related: Christian sex advice websites reveal evangelical political agenda
The number of complaints from servicemen and -women in the Army, Air Force, Marines and other service branches to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has doubled in number since November 2016, according to lawyer Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, a former Air Force officer who founded the organization.
Many of the recent charges are coming from members of minority religions, including Roman Catholics, Jews and Muslims, and from atheists. Among the complaints: military family and marital therapy programs are being infused with Protestant Christianity, which would go against the U.S. Constitution; open anti-Semitism; anti-LGBT statements, posters, symbols and bullying; openly anti-Muslim teachers and Islamophobic attacks; a rise in on-base evangelizing; and increased pressure on recruits […]
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