TVs on TV

Recently I was watching Question Time on BBC TV. I was pleasantly surprised to see a contribution being made by a member of the audience that was a transvestite. No-one t all seemed perturbed.

Yesterday I did search on Google using the term “question time transvestite”and came up with this which refers to a different Question Time program.

I spent a bit of time looking through the Stormfront web site and was appalled. They say that they are:

a community of racial realists and idealists. We are White Nationalists who support true diversity and a homeland for all peoples. Thousands of organizations promote the interests, values and heritage of non-White minorities. We promote ours. We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!

An alternative summary is:

Stormfront is a white nationalist and supremacist^[2] neo-Nazi^[3] Internet forum that was the Internet's first major hate site.^[4]

Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1995 by former Ku Klux Klan leader and white nationalist activist Don Black. It received national attention in the United States in 2000 after being featured as the subject of a documentary, Hate.com. Stormfront has been the subject of controversy after being removed from French and German Google indexes, for targeting an online FOX News poll on racial segregation, and for having political candidates as members. Its prominence has grown since the 1990s, attracting attention from watchdog organizations that oppose racism and antisemitism.

The website is a theme-based discussion forum with numerous boards for topics including ideology, science, revisionism, homeschooling, and self defense. Stormfront also hosts news stories, a merchandise store, and extensive links to racist organizations. The site has a logo featuring the Celtic cross common to neo-nazi iconography surrounded by the motto "White Pride World Wide".

It saddens me that there are people – and quite a lot of them – that seem to swallow the kind of stuff that Stormfront propagates.

Of course, the Express article that is mentioned by Stormfront leaves me saddened in a similar way.

The Google search did also come up with this at the Over 50’s forum. It’s nice to see a more open minded view of life.

Rome, freedom, power and persecution. Churches and Jesus. Matchsticks and premature ejaculation. Priests, sexuality and disaster. Art, porn and hermaphrodites.

We recently spent four days in Rome, doing the regular tourist kind of things. I was a really great time.

At the Coliseum there was an exhibit about the emperor Constantine which mentioned the Edict of Milan which was drawn up 1,700 years ago in the year 313 AD. It includes this kind of stuff:

Therefore, your Worship should know that it has pleased us to remove all conditions whatsoever, which were in the rescripts formerly given to you officially, concerning the Christians and now any one of these who wishes to observe Christian religion may do so freely and openly, without molestation. We thought it fit to commend these things most fully to your care that you may know that we have given to those Christians free and unrestricted opportunity of religious worship. When you see that this has been granted to them by us, your Worship will know that we have also conceded to other religions the right of open and free observance of their worship for the sake of the peace of our times, that each one may have the free opportunity to worship as he pleases; this regulation is made that we may not seem to detract from any dignity or any religion.

There are, of course, a lot of potential reasons as to why this religious freedom was being offered to people within the Roman empire. It’s strange though that, 1,700 years later, there are large chunks of the world that don’t do this.

It’s strange also how a part of Christianity developed from being a persecuted group of people, into a group that was tolerated and then accepted, into a group that was in power into a group that persecuted others.

There seems to be an almost inevitability in that wherever religions, of any type, gain a position of power then members of other religions end up being persecuted.

I remember many years ago being at an event where Tony Campolo was speaking. He said that he thought that the only churches that had never gotten heavily into persecution were the ones that had never had any power.

On another day, sitting in St Peter’s Basilica I was left wondering if it was the kind of lace that Jesus would have spent much time in.

Sitting in a metro station I watched a video featuring two match sticks in bed. I’ll leave you to work out what the video was advertising. 

I still find it strange that the churches are full of nude statues and paintings, but very fussy about bare shoulders and legs. It’s quaint that most of the nude statues in the Vatican Museum have been given plaster coatings to protect their genitalia and our modesty.

There were many very young looking priests around Rome. I’m not a psychologist or psychoanalyst. I don’t know if the sexual needs that I have are similar to those experienced by other people. But my guess would be that putting men into positions where they are forced to repress whatever sexuality they have, is a recipe for disaster. 

And wow. Guess what?

Speaking of nude statues. I kinda liked this one:

She must be art and not porn because she’s in the National Museum of Rome.

You need to see her from a different perspective to see what makes her special.

And another step closer …

The possibility of same sex marriages in the UK came yet another step closer today as the House of Lords voted overwhelmingly against a motion that was intended to block the same sex marriage bill.

The Telegraph put it like this.

Prior to the vote, some people had been predicting it might be a close call. But n the event, the attempt to block the bill was defeated by 390 votes to 148. Quite a sizeable majority.

As I mentioned here I had received a letter from Care that encouraged me to write to members of the House of Lords asking them to vote against the same sex marriage bill.

On May 25th I emailed Care at mail@care.org.uk as follows:

Dear Care,

I'm writing in response to a letter that you sent regarding the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill dated May 2013.

I'm saddened by the way that you are reacting to this whole issue and have made some comments on this here: http://andrea-wright.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/caring-and-care.html

Please let me know if you feel anything that I've said is unreasonable or unfair and I'll be happy to update it accordingly.

Alternatively, it would be really lovely if you were to change your views on this topic.

So far I’ve had no reply, suggesting either that people at Care are happy that my comments are reasonable and fair or that they are  busy doing other things and don’t care.