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Elderly Man Retires then Moves into Retirement Home Full of Single Women
On February 11, Pope Benedict announced his plan to retire at the end of February. That
story became front page news of almost every major newspaper in the world. Hours of network
television time were dedicated to the story. The Huffington Post’s Facebook page dedicated
to religion-centered stories altered their cover image to one featuring the pontiff and
ran 7 stories on the event with 8 more the day following.
A photo of lightening striking a lightning rod on top of St Peter’s Basilica went viral.
Meanwhile, on that same day, Egyptian Muslims selected their first new grand Mufti in 60
years. The day just before the Pope announced his resignation, the Syrian Greek Orthodox
Church enshrined a new Patriarch. The Anglican Church had just a month prior seated a new
Archbishop of Canterbury after the previous one resigned his post. Late last year, the
Copts, a Christian minority Church in Egypt, seated a new pope of their own. We at The
Infidel covered all of those stories and treated none of them as less significant than the
story any other.
The high school in Sullivan Indiana has a prom which is inclusive and open to students
regardless of *** persuasion. However, a movement has started in which several students,
their parents and one special needs student’s teacher have petitioned the school for a separate
prom which would exclude gay students from attending.
Speaking to television station WTWO, Diana Medley, the special education teacher mentioned
earlier, said of the homosexual students, "I believe that it was life circumstances
and they chose to be that way; God created everyone equal. Homosexual students come to
me with their problems, and I don’t agree with them, but I care about them. It’s the
same thing with my special needs kids. I think God puts everyone in our lives for a reason."
According to Southwest School Corporation Superintendent Chris Stitzle, the district
has no plans to honor the request for a second restricted prom, and assured that the open
prom will go ahead as planned.
In a recent posting on medium dot com, 27 year-old Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter
of Fred Phelps, the pastor and founder of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, announced
that she and her 19 year-old sister had left last November the organization run by her
family. In her statement Megan writes, "We know that we've done and said things that
hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn't the goal, but it was one of the outcomes.
We wish it weren't so, and regret that hurt."
In an interview given to the Kansas City Star newspaper, WBC spokesman Steve Drain said,
"We can’t control whether or not somebody decides, when they grow up, that they don’t
want to be here. Those two girls were kind of straddling the idea that they wanted to
be of the world but that they would also miss their family, the only thing they ever knew."
Drain then added, "If they continue with the position that they have, those two girls,
yeah, they’re going to hell." For their part, Megan says, "(The family) now consider
us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned.
We will never not love them."
A Distinction is not a difference
On February 4th, during a Vatican press conference Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia spoke about the
issue of legalizing gay marriage. That day a report appeared in the Religious News Service
which began as follows: "A high-ranking Vatican official on Monday voiced support for giving
unmarried couples some kind of legal protection even as he reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s
opposition to same-sex marriage."
Two days later, in an interview for Vatican radio, the Archbishop complained that his
message had been "derailed" to use his own word, insisting that the Catholic Church supports
the efforts by French bishops to lobby for the continuance of the laws denying gay marriage
rights. He added, "It is something else to examine if, in the existing [legal] systems,
those norms that protect individual rights may be derived. This is something completely
different from the approval of certain possibilities."
So, to reiterate, On February 4 it was reported that according to Archbishop Paglia, the Church
opposes gay marriage on moral grounds but supports civil legal protections for gays
who marry, but on February 7, he clarified that the Church supports civil legal protections
for gays who marry but opposes gay marriage on moral grounds.