As lgbt pride marches step off in big cities across the country, it’s important to note what takes place at some of the smaller ones.Central Pennsylvania was a focal point in the Democratic primary for its white working class voters. Those same voters are made uncomfortable by gays on the march.While this year marks the 38th pride march in San Francisco and New York, it will be only the third time that gays march in Pennsylvania’s state capital, Harrisburg.

When marchers there were greeted that first year by a strong chorus of opposition, a husband and wife team spontaneously set up a program rooted in their church’s teachings. [See clarification below.]

The Silent Witnesses:

Silent Witness PA (SWPA) is an organization of gay and straight allies dedicated to providing a non-confrontational buffer between those who condemn others based on their sexual orientation or identity and those they condemn. We provide visual protection from “street preachers” and protesters at events such as Pridefests…using our bodies and rainbow umbrellas as shields. In times of need, we intervene to prevent confrontations between protesters and event participants, often acting as escorts for those who would like to attend such events. Where there are those who publicly promote hate, we will be there to help provide a loving, supportive front opposing them. We are not counter-protesters. Instead, we provide a visual representation of support for those in our society who may feel marginalized… Our purpose is to act as a “human spiritual firewall” between GLBT folks and those individuals who believe GLBT’s are an abomination on the face of the earth.

They travel to pride events throughout PA. Their event schedule is here. Their training schedule is here.

RELATED: Those Pennsylvania protesters hit the big cities too. They lost a court battle in Philadelphia in January 2007. Said the judge, “There is no constitutional right to drown out the speech of another person.”

UPDATE: Alanna Berger emails a clarification:

We did not spontaneously set up a program rooted in our church’s teachings.  Originally, Silent Witnesses, organized by MCC of the Spirit in Harrisburg, held up signs welcoming the GLBT community to the PrideFest.  In 2005, this tactic no longer proved adequate in preventing angry and violent responses to the protesters, so Blaise and I worked with one of the original Silent Witnesses and brainstormed new tactics.  We came up with ideas in the spring of 2006, purchased safety vests that we modified to be easily identified as Silent Witnesses, found a donor of 24 rainbow umbrellas and trained more than 70 additional people from four Unitarian Universalist churches as well as members of the Greater Harrisburg Area in responding to spiritual violence with non-violence.  The teachings are similar to Gandhi’s and Dr. Martin Luther King’s and not exclusive to Unitarian Universalism.  We were asked by the Harrisburg Parade organizer to lead the parade, so this was not spontaneous – we knew months in advance.

The original founder is Yvonne Wilson from MCC of the Spirit in Harrisburg, and we refer to that group she started as the Original Silent Witnesses.  Blaise and I – along with Rosemary Mirocco from MCC – came up with the ideas to use the safety vests and umbrellas.  We consider this the second generation of silent witnesses, which we refer to as Silent Witness PA.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate comparing the Texas raid on the FLDS Church Community with the initial situation in Guantanamo Bay in 2002:

For those of you who haven’t been following the many legal twists and turns of the Texas polygamy story, today’s news of a state appellate court ruling that child welfare officials impermissibly seized hundreds of children from a polygamist ranch over three days in April will be shocking. It seemed an open-and-shut case of child abuse, right? Young girls married to much older men, trapped on a compound, bearing babies. The question was not so much why the state removed 465 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 3 but, rather, what the heck took them so long?

More recent reporting has shown that the legal apparatus intended to protect abused children in Texas was strained to the breaking point by what turned out to be one of the largest child welfare cases in American history. Earlier today, attorneys for Child Protective Services confirmed that 15 of the 31 “child” mothers placed in foster care were actually adults. One is 27. A 14-year-old removed as a child mother apparently has no children. The state had raided the ranch after a 16-year-old girl called an abuse hotline saying she had been beaten and raped by her 50-year-old husband, but that girl has not been found. And interim custody placements made parental visits difficult, if not impossible. Seized children were not even permitted to hear sect prophet Warren Jeffs’ name. The original custody proceedings had been hasty, chaotic, and confused. And estimated court costs were being projected at $2.25 million (before lawyers’ fees).

In other words, what was intended as a noble effort suddenly got mired down in tricky factual disputes, cultural and religious clashes, and the practical necessity of warehousing hundreds of human beings for an indefinite period of time. If this sounds a whole lot like the Bush administration’s fruitless, costly, and ultimately cruel exercises in mass justice at Guantanamo Bay, that’s because the parallels are hard to miss. In both cases, government actors hurled themselves at a problem with the best of intentions. The prospect of averting just one more terror attack, or protecting just one more molested child, has a way of making all those technical legal details seem trivial. But both cases have been plagued by glaring errors of fact and identification: Names and ages and associations were all jumbled up, hearsay and double hearsay piled up in place of real evidence. At the time, it probably seemed like all the who’s and where’s could eventually be sorted out later. But there were real costs to surging forward ahead of the legal niceties.

Via Alex Knapp at Outside the Beltway who notes that “by ignoring established policies and not doing a thorough investigation…the guilty go unpunished.” I tend to agree. My layman’s sense is that our responsible officials irresponsibly exaggerate the menace.

They think they’ve got such! bad! people! doing! such! bad! things! that the usual rules need not apply, cannot!!! apply!!! When, in fact, if they’d just follow the rules and do what needs to be done, maybe we could more quickly and fairly give the bad guys their due.

Now that the pro-Western government in Lebanon has been “put in its place” by Hezbollah - and by extension Iran and Syria - what is Israel up against - and what narrative will the Islamists use to heal the wounds and consolidate their victory?

Yasser Al Zaatera of Palestine’s Samiddon newspaper outlines the likely approach.

Explaining why Lebanon’s Pro-West Sunni government is afraid of Hezbullah and Iran, Zaatera writes:

“The people of the Umma [the Muslim Nation] and in particular the Sunnis, are as captive as they are perplexed. On the one hand, they know that what’s happening in Lebanon is an integral part of the battle that the Americans and Israelis are waging against forces of resistance and opposition in the region. Read the rest of this entry »

Much has been written in the foreign press about the real purpose of Pope Benedict XVI’s unprecedented election-year visit to the United States. Some charge that he came to bolster the only pro-life candidate, John McCain. Others have surmised that the Pope came to make common cause with President Bush to oppose the perceived threat of an expanding Islam.

Writing for Mexico’s La Jornada, Carlos Martínez García sees another motivation as key to the visit. García writes in part:

“As for Catholics in the United States, almost a third of the population has been brought up in that faith, but today only 24 percent of Americans call themselves Catholic, less than a half of those who identify themselves as Protestant/Evangelical - almost 52 percent. The study clearly shows that the strongest adherents of the Catholic Church are amongst recent immigrants. Forty-six percent of U.S. nationals born outside the country are Catholic, while 24 percent of them Protestant.”

So why the concern on the part of the Holy See?

Garcia continues:

“The situation changes when we consider the religious affiliation of those born in the United States: fifty-five percent are Protestant and 21 percent are Catholic. In other words, a significant percentage of those who were Catholic in their infancy, have over the years decided to change their affiliation, switching primarily to Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.”

In other words, the longer immigrants remain in the U.S., the greater the likelihood that they’ll switch to another denomination or religion.

Garcia concludes:

“To the Pope’s misfortune, the dynamics of change are influenced by factors beyond his control.”

By Carlos Martínez García

Translated By Halszka Czarnocka

April 23, 2008

Mexico - La Jornada - Original Article (Spanish)

The results of the trip are more media than real. Benedict the XVI’s visit to the United States ratified a pastoral line that doesn’t confront problems at their root but treats them superficially and postpones their resolution, to the detriment of the millions of Catholics whose disillusionment with the leadership of the Catholic Church continues to deepen.

A good number of commentators and analysts expressed surprise and even praised the papal decision to meet with some victims of clerical pedophilia in the United States. They forget that due to the peculiarity of United States society, both in terms of its religious composition and the vigilance with which it monitors leaders of any kind, Pope Benedict XVI was practically obliged to show some sign that these outrageous abuses will not happen again.

We know of the magnitude of the sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests in that country thanks to the mobilization of those who were assaulted and the solidarity of people who assisted them in disseminating news about the size of the problem and suing the pedophiles in court. It was an organization of citizens and its insistence on documenting and making public the sexual attacks of clergy in that country, which made it possible to make the issue a public one of such national significance.

The various centers of ecclesiastic authority, both in the U.S. and Rome, did everything possible to conceal the scandals. When they failed in the attempt, they imposed damage control measures and tried unsuccessfully to minimize the problem.

It was an entire network of complicity within the U.S. Catholic Church that permitted thousands of cases of sexual abuse, not the isolated behavior of this or that cleric. In this regard there is convincing data:

“A study ordered by the North American Episcopal Conference in 2004 … concluded that the number of children victimized by about 5 000 priests over the past three decades was over 11,000. Since many cases have been resolved according to the culture and civil law of the United States, the relevant statistics include $2 billion that has been paid in out in this regard, which has contributed to bankruptcy of more than a few diocese” (from The Pope and Clerical Pedophilia in Mexico [El Papa y la pederastia clerical en México] by Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, Proceso).

The Pope pronounced words and promised actions favorable to Latin American immigrants, the majority of whom entered the United States without a visa. The productive apparatus in the United States has benefited on a great scale from these so-called illegals by paying them low wages and providing them with almost no social benefits. For the most part, these people come to that nation as Catholics and are the main factor in the growth of Catholicism there. This reality has another less well-known side, which is creating concern at the Holy See in Rome.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of our nation.

In the light of Easter, an interesting article at Turkish Daily News:

The Syriacs in southeast Turkey are celebrating Easter, with high hopes for the future. There are approximately 2,000 Syriacs left in the hilly region around Mardin and Midyat in southeast Turkey, bound in by the Tigris to the north and east, and by the Syrian border to the south. Most villages of Tur Abdin are desolate and decayed. Approximately, 300 to 400,000 Syriacs from Turkey live in Europe.

Never heard of the Syriacs? Neither did I before reading this article:

Syriacs are Christians whose gospels are written in Aramaic…

The Syriac church has had a key role in maintaining the culture and language, which survives in the liturgy and is close to the spoken language (in Turkish, Süryanice)…

The Syriac Church was instrumental in preserving a great part of the ancient Greek heritage at a time when the Western church was banning it, passing it on to the Arabs, who in turn fed it back into Europe. Large chunks of the book of Ezra and Daniel in the Old Testament are written in Aramaic. Father Gabriel says that civilization is like a river. “Everybody siphons water off, but we must also put some in.�

This “ancient Christian community” has a troubled past:

During the government’s efforts to flush out the PKK from the area in the 1980s and 90s, many Syriacs were caught in the crossfire and forced to abandon their villages, seeking a better life in Europe and the United States. Many suffered direct intimidation and outright violence from Kurds who wanted to occupy their homes, they claim. Kurdish village guards, fighting alongside government forces against the PKK, were granted many abandoned houses, they say.

In 2004, under pressure from the European Union, Turkey conceded that the village of Sare should be vacated for returning Syriacs.

Read it all at the Turkish Daily News website. Quite fascinating, isn’t it?