National Condom Week

From Planned Parenthood:

While a lot of us are enjoying Valentine's Day with loved ones this weekend, there's another annual event taking place that you might have missed: this week is National Condom Week!

Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest provider of contraceptive services, so we're pretty big fans of National Condom Week. It's a time to talk about important issues like contraceptive access and education, not to mention prevention of sexually transmitted infections. But mostly, it's a time to celebrate that simple, effective, wonderful invention known as the latex condom.

So we've pulled together a few of our favorite condom-related videos and put them all in one playlist. Want to see condoms used in high fashion? Or maybe it's time for a brief refresher on properly using a condom? And then there's my favorite, the Golden Girls shopping at the pharmacy, with Bea Arthur yelling, "Condoms, Rose! Condoms!"

Click here to watch our playlist. While you're there, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel — it's the best way to stay up-to-date on the sometimes fun, sometimes serious, but always engaging videos from Planned Parenthood.

From all of us at Planned Parenthood, Happy National Condom Week!

Click here to find out more about National Condom Week. Click here to learn about the amazing OWL program that many UU Churches offer. I was a chaperone for an overnight and the kids are really funny and engaged...they learned all about lovemaking (gay and straight) last night and will find out everything they need to know about contraception, abortion, family planning, the importance of making good decisions, etc. today. Can't wait for my children to be old enough to go through the program.

Resolutions

Need help making some meaningful resolutions? Click here to "resolve to make a difference" and  here for green resolutions. 

UPDATE: Help make Randy Pausch Beliefnet's “Most Inspiring Person of the Year”!

UPDATE: He won! Thanks for your help. Here's an article about it.
---
From the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations:

Help make Randy Pausch Beliefnet's “Most Inspiring Person of the Year”!

Beliefnet.com has selected Dr. Randy Pausch, a Unitarian Universalist, as one of the ten most inspiring people of the year with a chance of being voted the “Most Inspiring Person of 2008” during the next week. The other two finalists for this award are country singer Steven Curtis Chapman and the Boy Scouts who survived an Iowa tornado earlier this year.

Dr. Pausch, who passed away this summer, was the Carnegie Mellon professor whose video and book, “The Last Lecture,” have inspired millions.

It is a great honor to be voted Beliefnet.com’s most inspiring person of the year, and we would be thrilled if a Unitarian Universalist were selected. You can help: voting will continue through Friday, December 5, at midnight. You may vote once a day—and we hope that you will share this information with your friends!

Read Beliefnet’s column on Randy Pausch. Go directly to the voting page.

For additional information, you can also read UUA.org’s interview with Dr. Pausch, conducted shortly before his death.

Sick to death

I am sick to death of the Bible being used against LGBT folks. There is NOTHING in the bible that should be construed as "god hates gays." This quote from Billy Graham's son, Franklin, has just set me off:

Though never partisan in his preaching, Billy Graham is a registered Democrat. His son expressed concern about Obama's views on abortion and gay marriage — an issue Franklin Graham raised in a meeting with the Illinois senator — saying that he and is father are conservatives who believe the Bible speaks clearly on those issues.
"President-elect Obama heard our position," Franklin Graham said. "And I told him that this was very difficult for us and hard for us. It's a moral issue that we just can't back down on."

Moral issue? What type of morality denies the rights, feelings, and expressions of love of fellow human beings? What kind of bullshit is that? I hope against hope that Obama's administration is progressive enough to re-frame morality and strip it from the hate-filled, tight-fisted hands of the radical right. Why is it that Republicans are the party of family values? It is such crap. I am fuming and I haven't even thought about the abortion aspect yet!

What to do? Read the Bible for yourself to see that it has little, if anything to say about gay folks. If you don't want to read it, check out a website called Religious Tolerance. Their take on the Bible and Homosexuality can be found here. Some tidbits:

1. The Bible has a lot to say about temple prostitution, including homosexual ritual prostitution. This was a common practice within the Canaanite fertility religion; some believe that the practice was also taken up by some ancient Israelites.
2. God’s destruction of town of Sodom had nothing to do with homosexuality.
3. The Bible says little about homosexual feelings.
4. It says nothing about sexual orientation; the concept of orientation dates only from the late 19th century.
5. A number of homosexual relationships are described positively or neutrally in the Bible.
6. Of the many hundreds of Jesus’ instructions and prohibitions, few have a sexual component and none condemn homosexuality.
7. Paul may have condemned same-sex sexual activities by homosexuals, but the passages are unclear; there are many possible interpretations.
8. Bible translators must be aware of the errors that have been made in previous versions of the Bible; they are widely discussed in theological literature. But it would probably not be economically possible at this time to produce a translation of the Bible that was accurate. People are so used to expecting homophobic references in a half-dozen locations in scripture that they probably would not buy a Bible that was accurate to the original text, or which admitted that the meanings of certain words are unknown. (emphasis added because I'm pissed!)

Number 8 (and Prop 8!) speaks volumes to the problems LGBT folks and progressives struggle against. It reminds me of a Chinese proverb - "a closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood."

What else to do? Read Moral Politics by George Lakoff. I blogged about it here. Oh, and, Jesus Rode a Donkey by Linda Seger.

Support your local UU church. They do good work, are welcoming to the LGBT community, and work to fight religious oppression of all people.

What else? Find out what the Human Rights Campaign fund is up to as well as People for the American Way and see how you, too, can help wrestle the mantle of morality from the radical right.

Rant over. Thanks for listening.

UU Tragedy

A gunman open fired in the sanctuary of a UU church in Tennessee today. Please hold close those killed, injured, and suffering through this tragic event and remember the Seven Principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.