Yellow Ribbon Campaign Seeks Catholic Support for Gay Rights

A new campaign from the Las Memorias Project, which works to prevent HIV among Latinos, asks Catholic parishioners to wear yellow ribbons to support LGBT rights.

The Yellow Ribbon Campaign seeks supportive Catholic leaders who will show support for LGBT people and opposition to the Catholic church’s antigay policies by wearing a yellow ribbon during Sunday services throughout the summer. In an open letter, Las Memorias Project’s Richard Zaldivar writes, “[T]here is a campaign by conservative bishops to challenge our movement for wellness and equality for members of our community. [They] are using the pews of the Catholic Church to promote a political agenda. Church should not be used for politics nor should it be to prevent wellness in our community.

On Sunday, please wear a yellow ribbon or cloth on your shirt or blouse to support Catholics for Equality and Social Justice. This is not confronting the church but to remind our faith leaders that the doors of the faith community must be open to everyone in order to promote community wellness. Please encourage your family members and friends to wear the yellow ribbon in support of equality and social justice.”

Read more here:  New Campaign Asks Catholic Parishioners to Show Support for LGBT Rights

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• The Wall Las Memorias Asks Catholics to Wear Yellow Ribbons on Sunday to Support LGBT Equality (pinkbananaworld.com)

Ky. Baptist church ordains openly gay man

An eastern Louisville Baptist church has ordained an openly gay man as a minister with unanimous support from church members.

Highland Baptist Church on Sunday ordained Maurice “Bojangles” Blanchard, a local gay-rights advocate who started the church’s gay and lesbian outreach group last year.

Church Pastor Joe Phelps says ordaining Blanchard was “new territory” for the church but in April it moved to support his ordination.

The Fairness Campaign, a Louisville-based gay rights organization, hailed Blanchard’s ordination as 1 of only about two dozen at Baptist churches in the U.S.

–Wave3

Vicious Time (Habakkuk 1:2)

How long, Adonai, am I to cry for help

                   while you do not listen?

                How long will I cry “Oppression!” in your ear

                   and you do not save?

Habakkuk 1:2

Life in the “meantime” is difficult. Habakkuk is experiencing his meantime between God’s generous offer of a promise and the fruition of that promise. We know how this feels. Many of us experience the promise of equality while still living in the not-yet of the politically expedient.

Like Habakkuk, we mourn the prayers that go unanswered. Like Habakkuk, we feel that our yearning for communities of understanding is distorted. How long shall we cry for help? Will the Sacred, which professes to honor empathy and personhood, hear our cries?

There are times when God seems so far away that I wonder if I have fooled myself. For Habakkuk and us, our frustration is born out of our experience that this is the same God who breathed life into creation, the same God who split the sea, the same God who entered into covenant, and the same God who raises the dead. Why does this God tarry and turn a blind eye? Why doesn’t this God rouse the divine self and attend once again to the cries of those in need? Why have we only heard of the wonders of God and not experienced them in our time?

This is the tension of the “meantime.” I long and hope and wait for a timing that is known to the Sacred yet is hidden to me. Feeling blocked out I am frustrated. Far more exhilarating is the time of receiving a promise, or the time of seeing it fulfilled. Much harder is living in the meantime. Where is that threshold at which “meantime” becomes “mean (or vicious) time?”

-full reflection at The Bible in Drag