President Obama Took Me To Church Today

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.............. He addressed me. At one point the president started speaking about Roof directly, and the easily imaginable theft of lives of people who look like me, because they look like me.

“We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew of all this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act,” he said. “It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs, and arson, and shots fired at churches. Not random, but as a means of control. A way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear, and recrimination. Violence and suspicion. An act that he assumed would deepen divisions that would trace back to our nation’s original sin.

“Oh,” he said, the faint traces of a chuckle bubbling deep in his chest. “But God works in mysterious ways.”

In that moment, I again thought of my blackness. For about 40 minutes, to remember a dead preacher, Obama became one. For about 40 minutes, he spoke, as members of Pinckney’s family and flock urged him on. He spoke about being black, about the pain and the fear and the uncertainty and the heartbreak that floods every black heart, every day, and he spoke about it unflinchingly, with pride, in front of anyone and everyone who was watching. I got chills, and then I started to smile. I was back in church, joyfully reveling in the word of a God I do not know, and in a community I’ve never visited, and in the very blackness that could be my undoing. I wanted to laugh out loud and stand up, but something kept me seated, watching this church service in another room.

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And then he started to sing. It was planned, of course, scripted. Obama spoke the words, “amazing grace.” Then he sat in silence for five seconds or so. Then he said those two words again, in a deep, gravelly voice. He was singing “Amazing Grace,” an old Negro spiritual that blacks in this country have been singing in churches for generations. I still remembered.

Everyone at the ceremony stood and joined him. I got chills again as I mouthed the words, staring through my computer screen. When he named the eight others who lost their lives—Cynthia Hurd, and Susie Jackson, and Ethel Lance, and DePayne Middleton-Doctor, and Tywanza L. Sanders, and Daniel L. Simmons Sr., and Shoranda Coleman Singleton, and Myra Thompson—I panicked, thinking I’d cry. I didn’t. Because for that moment, I felt stronger—actually, physically stronger. I felt my cape, more than ever, but for the first time since I first donned it, over a decade ago, my blackness felt light, and warm. I didn’t feel small. And then I thought about my parents.



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The First Couple Of The USA!

RUDE PUNDIT: "You cannot deny country is a better place than it was before Obama took office"

6/26/2015

The Lesson of This Week: We're Sick of the Past

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This week, the American people and the Supreme Court and President Obama declared the past done. Obviously, we need to learn from the past. But the idea is that you learn from it and then move forward. You don't pretend it didn't happen. And you sure as shit don't live in it. You live now, with an eye to the future. Otherwise we're damned to repeat.

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And the Supreme Court this week had bad news for Americans who want things to go backwards. No, sorry, go fuck yourself, it said, we're not going back to the savage healthcare system we had before the Affordable Care Act (which, yes, is not perfect, but is a helluva lot better than it was). And your religious beliefs from the past aren't worth two gerbil shits when it comes to recognition of the right of two consenting adults to marry. If the only thing you have to defend your goddamned mean dumbness is "That's the way it's always been done," then you have nothing.




These next few days are going to be overloaded with overheated rhetoric from the right-wing commentariat, all trying desperately to drag us back into their cruel, racist, homophobic past. We will hear about how God wants things, as if that has jackshit to do with how we create our laws. We will hear about constitutional amendments, which is the only way to change what the Supreme Court did (and, yes, the Supreme Court is the final word on the Constitution as it exists today). We will hear hysteria and moaning from people who are watching as the past, their past, the past they have clung to and believed in and lived for is murdered right before their eyes by the vicissitudes of progress. They are becoming isolated, these past-clingers, and they have revealed themselves as, at best, useless or, at worst, destructive.

Finally, let us exult, briefly, before we righteously criticize him again, that the transformative legacy of President Obama was affirmed this week. As he said in his interview with Marc Maron, which was released on Monday, you cannot deny that the country is a better place than it was before he took office. If you try, you are lying. We voted for the man, most of us twice, and, damn, some days it's good to feel proud of that. Let's enjoy that for a moment before we remember, oh, yeah, drone war and banker-coddling.

The future is ahead, with all the hard work it takes to get there. Onward.
- See more at: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/#sthash.vWipOMj1.dpuf

Gay Men's Chorus of Washington Sings National Anthem After Supreme Court Ruling

Harvey, it finally happened.

Scalia's Dissent: ‘Ask the nearest hippie’ if marriage helps intimacy

SCALIA:


http://www.marketwatch.com/story/scalia-ask-the-nearest-hippie-if-marriage-helps-intimacy-2015-06-26






I would like to inform mr. scalia that mr pete & i, having met and loved as flower children/hippies in the Summer of 1970 (on the beach, barefoot, I might add) are happy and thriving free-thinkers 42 years later.

AMAZING GRACE

Justice Kennedy's beautiful closing paragraph on marriage will bring a tear to your eye

"Not Taking Down Our Flag"

For These Times: Acoustic Kitty