As the battle over gay marriage heats up in this election year, one evangelical Christian writer is calling for a truce, fearing that the outspoken opposition to gay marriage among some church leaders could alienate an entire generation of religious youth.
“Evangelicals have been so submitted to these culture wars for so long, so that’s hard to give up,” evangelical writer and speaker Rachel Held Evans, 31, told msnbc.com. But “the majority of young Christians really, really, really want to stop with the political emphasis.”
Held Evans, who regularly speaks at Christian colleges, said the young Christians she meets are much more open to gay rights than are older generations, an observation backed up by polling data.
A 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute shows the generation gap between young Christians and their elders is large, with 44 percent of white evangelicals aged 18-29 in support of marriage equality compared to only 12 percent of those 65 and older.
According to the same survey, nearly 70 percent of young Christians also agree that religious groups are alienating young people by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues.
“For young Christians, having gay and lesbian friends is just a part of our life,” Held Evans said. “It’s just really hard for us to see them as mere issues to debate, because we’re talking about our friends here.”
The shift is manifesting itself increasingly on Christian college campuses, including at Biola University in California, where, about two months ago, an anonymous group of students announced the presence of the “Biola Queer Underground,” asking that the LGBT community on campus “be treated with equality and respected as another facet of Biola’s diversity.”
At Wheaton College in Illinois, a group of alumni known as OneWheaton coalesced in 2011 to express its support of the LGBT community on campus.
“OneWheaton understands that LGBTQ issues are difficult to process at Wheaton College,” reads a statement from the group. “We desire this to change for current students and wish to create such an environment, a safe place for them to process these issues and develop into the people they are meant to be.”  In response, school officials have said they are open to having a conversation about homosexuality on campus.
To Held Evans, American churches’ attitude toward gay rights will play an important role in the retention of young Christians. In an article she wrote following North Carolina’s recent vote to ban gay marriage, Held Evans points to data mentioned in David Kinnaman’s book You Lost Me, which shows that 59 percent of teens who were raised Christian abandon the church when they become adults. One of the main reasons, the article says, is the church’s attitude toward gay rights.
Fellow Christian writer Matthew Lee Anderson, 30, agrees that there is a generational shift taking place in Christians’ support for gay rights, but he is less convinced it’ll lead to any profound changes in the near-term.
“Those of the conservative side aren’t going away. They’re just going to be a lot more careful in terms of how they frame their positions,” Anderson told msnbc.com.
He also doesn’t think younger Christians are going to embrace more liberal views on matters of sexuality, including homosexuality.
“There’s going to be a large, less vocal, at least a substantive minority  –  it’s not an outright majority  –  of younger evangelicals who are going to take a broadly conservative position on sexual ethics,” he said.
That position stems from the conviction that God defined marriage in the scripture as between a man and a woman, Anderson said, and Christians don’t believe they have the right to redefine it.
For thousands of years the definition of marriage has been the same, said Pastor Joel Hunter, a spiritual advisor to President Obama. “And so, there’s some reason for the apprehension that says this thing is moving so fast that I wonder what the next 10 years will hold,” he told msnbc.com.
In Hunter’s view, the word “marriage” cannot be used to characterize a same-sex union, but he believes having this debate on a national stage offers a unique opportunity.
“We really have an opportunity to raise the level of respect, to raise the dialogue to where no rights of one group trumps another group’s rights,” he said, adding: “The scripture has certain listed sins, and we want to dissuade people from those behaviors, because we think in the long run if it’s in scripture then that’s not something that God approves of.”
Hunter, who leads a Florida megachurch, said he believes the government could establish a kind of civil marriage, which would not fit within the definition of Biblical marriage.
”We don’t 100 percent equate this as a part of the civil rights movement because for us at least a part of this is a matter of choice, it’s a behavior, and so it’s a different category than skin pigmentation,” he said. “Having said that, we want to be sure that all Americans do have citizens’ rights to enter any legal relationship that they want to.”
But finding compromise appears unlikely, Anderson believes, as most players on the national stage treat the debate as a zero-sum game.
“It’s winner-take-all, and there’s sort of no middle ground between the two positions,” he said.
While young Christians may be divided on whether gay relationships should be celebrated in the church, Held Evans said, they’re increasingly unified on their stance against legislative action, such as North Carolina’s gay marriage ban and others that will be up for votes this fall.
“Even young Christians who think that gay relationships are not God’s design, a lot of them will still say ‘but I think it should be legal for gay people to get married, because this is America,’” Held Evans said.
“I think the main problem we have is that a lot of the folks voting about homosexuality, voting about gay marriage, don’t know any gay people,” she said. “And I’m certain that if they did, it would change their attitude.”
from MSNBC

Armando Montano

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO – Armando Montano, an aspiring journalist who was working this summer as a news intern for The Associated Press in the Mexican capital, was found dead early Saturday. He was 22 years old.
Montano’s body was found in the elevator shaft of an apartment building near where he was living in the capital’s Condesa neighborhood. The circumstances of his death were being investigated by Mexican authorities.
The Colorado Springs, Colorado, resident arrived in Mexico City in early June after graduating from Grinnell College with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and a concentration in Latin American studies.
During his time in the bureau, Montano covered stories including the saga of nine young elephants from Namibia who wound up on an animal reserve in Mexico’s Puebla state, and the shooting of three federal policemen at the Mexico City airport.
He was not on assignment at the time of his death. The U.S. embassy is monitoring the course of the investigation.
Montano had planned to attend a master’s degree program in journalism at the University of Barcelona in the fall.
With his high energy and broad smile, Montano made scores of friends within weeks after his arrival in the Mexican capital.
“Armando was a smart, joyful, hardworking and talented young man,” said Marjorie Miller, AP’s Latin America editor based in Mexico City.
“He absolutely loved journalism and was soaking up everything he could,” said Miller. “In his short time with the AP, he won his way into everyone’s hearts with his hard work, his effervescence and his love of the profession.”
In December and January, Montano covered the Iowa presidential caucuses as a news intern for The New York Times, and last year worked for several months as an intern covering policy and finance for The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.
“Mando was a standout young journalist, with a rare passion and exuberance for life and for people,” said Richard Berke, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times. “He accomplished so much and touched so many in a short time, and his potential was truly limitless.”
Berke said that he arranged to have Montano help cover the caucuses because he was so impressed with the young reporter when they met earlier at the New York Times Student Journalism Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, said, “The loss of this vibrant young journalist is a shock to his colleagues and the long list of people who called Armando friend.”
Montano had also been a multimedia and reporting intern at The Colorado Independent, an online news service; and a reporting and investigative intern at The Seattle Times.
At the Scarlet & Black, Grinnell College’s student newspaper in Grinnell, Iowa, he worked as an editor and writer.
Montano was the recipient of an Ellen Masin Persina Scholarship from the National Press Club in 2008; a Newhouse Scholar with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 2008; and a Chips Quinn Scholar from the Freedom Forum for Diversity in 2011. He belonged to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.
Born in Massachusetts, Montano was a fluent Spanish speaker who grew up in Colorado but lived for two years as a child in Costa Rica and spent time in Argentina and on the U.S.-Mexico border with his family.
He is survived by his parents, Diane Alters and Mario Montano, of Colorado Springs, who both teach at Colorado College.
from The Miami Herald
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Alexandra Pennell

NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT – The day Alexandra Pennell addressed an anti-hate rally at Central Connecticut State University about the anti-gay messages scrawled on her door, police had begun to question her claims.
Twice the video surveillance system placed in Pennell’s room to help police identify the person responsible for scrawling the notes had been disabled, in one case just before a note was slid under Pennell’s dorm room door.
Police say only after they set up a second camera in a hall closet — a camera that Pennell did not know about — did they learn the truth: Pennell had been writing the notes herself.
The 19-year-old from Trumbull has been thrown out of Central and barred from attending any state university for five years. She also faces eight felony counts of fabricating evidence, eight misdemeanor charges of lying to police, eight misdemeanor counts of filing a false police report and one count of making a false statement to police.
She was arrested May 2 and has been free on a written promise to appear in court. She has pleaded not guilty and is due back in court July 26 in New Britain.
When first confronted by police about the notes, they say Pennell became defensive and insisted she did not place them on her door or slide them under her door. When Lt. Edward Dercole of the CCSU police told her of the second video camera, which captured her sliding one of the notes under her door, she said she had only left one or two of the notes, but she insisted the rest were real. When told the second camera had been recording for a long time, Pennell confessed to planting all the notes, according to the warrant for her arrest.
She told police she faked the notes to get her roommate’s attention with the hope that her roommate, Siobhan Dooley, would spend more time with her.
Dooley, who does not face charges, then gave police a copy of a letter Pennell had given her. In the letter, Pennell wrote that she started leaving the notes because she felt that all of her close friends were slipping away and that she also feared she was losing her girlfriend.
She continued writing and leaving the notes, she wrote in the letter to Dooley, because of the attention it brought her, especially from Dooley and another friend.
Pennell also wrote in the letter to Dooley that she understood the severity of what she had done, took responsibility for it, turned herself into police and signed a confession. Police noted in the warrant for Pennell’s arrest that Pennell denied involvement with the notes until confronted with the video evidence.
CCSU took Pennell’s claims of anti-gay harassment seriously, and on March 13, hundreds of students attended the anti-hate rally where Pennell spoke.
“All I have to say is that I’m not going to be run out of my home, and I will not be intimidated by hate,” she said at the rally.
CCSU police, who began an intense investigation after the first note was reported March 7, tracked down a host of leads in their search for the person leaving the notes.
On March 13 at about 4 p.m., just before Pennell headed off to speak at the campus rally against hate, Pennell reported to police that she found another harassing note that had been left when she went to take a shower. The video surveillance system police left in Pennell’s room to identify the person leaving the notes had been disabled just before the note was allegedly slid under Pennell’s door.
Dercole, who placed the surveillance system in Pennell’s room, noted that a cable had been pulled out of the device. Pennell told Dercole she may have accidentally caused the cable to come out when she opened her desk drawer. Dercole tried to dislodge the cable by opening the drawer and noted that the cable did not dislodge.
He then checked the connection and noted that it took “a fair amount of effort with one hand holding the receiver and the other pulling on the plug to unplug” the cable, according to the warrant.
Pennell and her friends then left for the rally.
On March 22, because of the suspected tampering with the device left in Pennell’s room, Dercole and Det. Densil Samuda set up the second recording device in a locked closet and did not tell Pennell about it.
On April 5 at 3:35 p.m., Dercole and Samuda went to Pennell’s room to remove the recording device left there, telling Pennell they were sending it out to be repaired.
Less than an hour later, CCSU police received another complaint from Pennell about another note. Two officers took Pennell’s complaint while Dercole retrieved the second recording device.
That video shows Pennell walking off with a friend, then returning a moment later, speaking with two friends before going into her room. Two minutes later, she came out, looked around and then slid a note under her door.
A short time later, she is seen returning to her dorm room, walking in with a friend, then walking out three minutes later with the note. She headed to the resident assistant’s office to report the incident.
Police confronted Pennell on April 13.
Pennell could not be reached for comment. She said Trumbull was her hometown when she was interviewed by The Courant at the March 13 rally. Arrest paperwork lists an address in Ellicott City, Md.
Pennell’s attorney, public defender Cortney A. Volz, declined to comment on the case.
from The Hartford Courant

Anderson Cooper

Last week, Entertainment Weekly ran a story on an emerging trend: gay people in public life who come out in a much more restrained and matter-of-fact way than in the past. In many ways, it’s a great development: we’re evolved enough not to be gob-smacked when we find out someone’s gay. But it does matter nonetheless, it seems to me, that this is on the record. We still have pastors calling for the death of gay people, bullying incidents and suicides among gay kids, and one major political party dedicated to ending the basic civil right to marry the person you love. So these “non-events” are still also events of a kind; and they matter. The visibility of gay people is one of the core means for our equality.
All of which is a prelude to my saying that I’ve known Anderson Cooper as a friend for more than two decades. I asked him for his feedback on this subject, for reasons that are probably obvious to most. Here’s his email in response which he has given me permission to post here:

Andrew, as you know, the issue you raise is one that I’ve thought about for years. Even though my job puts me in the public eye, I have tried to maintain some level of privacy in my life. Part of that has been for purely personal reasons. I think most people want some privacy for themselves and the people they are close to.

But I’ve also wanted to retain some privacy for professional reasons. Since I started as a reporter in war zones 20 years ago, I’ve often found myself in some very dangerous places. For my safety and the safety of those I work with, I try to blend in as much as possible, and prefer to stick to my job of telling other people’s stories, and not my own. I have found that sometimes the less an interview subject knows about me, the better I can safely and effectively do my job as a journalist.

I’ve always believed that who a reporter votes for, what religion they are, who they love, should not be something they have to discuss publicly. As long as a journalist shows fairness and honesty in his or her work, their private life shouldn’t matter. I’ve stuck to those principles for my entire professional career, even when I’ve been directly asked “the gay question,” which happens occasionally. I did not address my sexual orientation in the memoir I wrote several years ago because it was a book focused on war, disasters, loss and survival. I didn’t set out to write about other aspects of my life.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle. It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something – something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.

I’ve also been reminded recently that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible. There continue to be far too many incidences of bullying of young people, as well as discrimination and violence against people of all ages, based on their sexual orientation, and I believe there is value in making clear where I stand.

The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.

I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I’m not an activist, but I am a human being and I don’t give that up by being a journalist.

Since my early days as a reporter, I have worked hard to accurately and fairly portray gay and lesbian people in the media – and to fairly and accurately portray those who for whatever reason disapprove of them. It is not part of my job to push an agenda, but rather to be relentlessly honest in everything I see, say and do. I’ve never wanted to be any kind of reporter other than a good one, and I do not desire to promote any cause other than the truth.

Being a journalist, traveling to remote places, trying to understand people from all walks of life, telling their stories, has been the greatest joy of my professional career, and I hope to continue doing it for a long time to come. But while I feel very blessed to have had so many opportunities as a journalist, I am also blessed far beyond having a great career.

I love, and I am loved.

In my opinion, the ability to love another person is one of God’s greatest gifts, and I thank God every day for enabling me to give and share love with the people in my life. I appreciate your asking me to weigh in on this, and I would be happy for you to share my thoughts with your readers. I still consider myself a reserved person and I hope this doesn’t mean an end to a small amount of personal space. But I do think visibility is important, more important than preserving my reporter’s shield of privacy.
Anderson Cooper

from The Daily Beast / Andrew Sullivan

Ed Lefkowitz & Brian Harradine

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA – There were two things Ed Lefkowitz and Brian Harradine had in mind when looking for a California city to call home: It had to be gay friendly and near Harradine’s family.
The couple looked at San Francisco, San Diego and Long Beach.
They chose Palm Springs — but not just for the warm weather, spectacular scenery and open attitude. It also had the hottest prices.
Two Palm Springs ZIP codes are among the most affordable in America with the highest concentration of same-sex male couples, according to research by online real estate company Trulia. The findings come as cities across the country celebrate LGBT Pride Month.
“We fell in love with it, and this is where we could get the most bang for our buck money- wise,” Lefkowitz said.
In ZIP codes 92264 and 92262 — No. 2 and No. 4 in the list — gay couples share 12.4 percent and 11.3 percent of the households, respectively.
In those ZIP codes, the average price of real estate is $141 per square foot.
Trulia used information from the 2010 U.S. Census to determine the top 10 ZIP codes in America with the highest concentration of gay and lesbian couples. The company also determined the average cost per square foot of real estate in each area.
The only ZIP code with a median price per square foot of real estate lower than Palm Springs is Pleasant Ridge, Mich., at $107.
The Castro District in San Francisco, which boasts the gayest ZIP code with 14.2 percent, is also the most expensive at a $671 per square foot.
John Tanzella, president and CEO of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, said San Francisco has the highest concentration of gay and lesbian couples because of the history of gay rights in that city. He said people find a trade-off between cost of living and the amenities of a major metro city.
Other cities in the top 10 with the strongest populations of same-sex male couples in America were California’s West Hollywood; Provincetown on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod; Wilton Manor, near Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Oak Lawn, near Dallas; Rehoboth Beach, Del.; and Pleasant Ridge, near Detroit.
Affordability is just an extra perk for gay couples to choose Palm Springs, said Kevin Stern, president of the Desert Gay Tourism Guild.
“A majority of them move here because of the warm weather, the acceptance of everyone and openness,” he said.
Michael Green, president of the Desert Gay Tourism Guild attested.
“People retiring or who are taking early retirement want a place that’s safe and secure to be open, ” he said. “And it’s affordable, which makes it better.”
Historically, retirement influenced migration to Palm Springs, Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA School of Law, said in an email to The Desert Sun.
He said older members of the LGBT community came of age when there was “substantially more social stigma around their sexual orientation” and they are probably more attracted LGBT- specific areas such as Palm Springs.
Though the city topped the list for same-sex male couples, the Coachella Valley did not have any ZIP codes with a high concentration of lesbian couples.
“Relatively expensive urban areas with fewer child- oriented amenities are probably less attractive to them,” Gates said. “I’m not sure that I can cite a particular reason Palm Springs has attracted proportionally more gay men.”
from The Desert Sun
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