So everyone is talking about it. Maine lost for Marriage equality . Although it is easy to give in to the anger mainly toward the religious right we must not let the anger sway us from our mission. My gay friends should be able to marry as I can and I am shocked and angry at the results.
“An Act to Remove Protections Based on Sexual Orientation from the… Maine Human Rights Act, Eliminate Funding of Civil Rights Teams in Public Schools, Prohibit Adoptions by Unmarried Couples, Add a Definition of Marriage, and Declare Civil Unions Unlawful”
Are you kidding me??!!! What is next religious right? I am scared to ask. Plain and simple your crazy.
Feel free to wrote to him and tell him what you feel!
Michael S.Heath
70 Sewall Street
Augusta, ME 04330
(H) (207) 445-4929 (W) 622-7634
Religion has no place in State!! Religious groups should not even be allowed to donate money to such campaigns. We must fight . Keep Equality.
And as a friend of mine quoted “Just remember people the Declaration of Independence promises us “LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS” The dictionary describes liberty as ” FREEDOM FROM CONTROL, interference, obligation, RESTRICTION, HAMPERING CONDITIONS, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.” so congratulations Maine, for shitting on the very foundation this country was built on. “ Thank you AJ I hope people keep that in mind.
On another subject sorry about the delay on the interview postings. I have many but have a bit of editing to do so I will let you know when the first one will be up beforehand.
Grace Patricia Kelly ( 12 November 1929 – 14 September 1982) was an American film and stage actress and fashion icon who later became Princess Grace of Monaco.
Kelly became an actress in the 1950s, starring in such films as Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, High Society, and The Country Girl, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She retired from acting in 1956, at age 26, when she became “Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco” upon marrying Rainier III, Prince of Monaco. The couple later had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stephanie. Kelly maintained dual American and Monegasque citizenship after her marriage.
Kelly died after being critically injured in a car accident with her daughter Stephanie in September 1982. The American Film Institute ranked her #13 amongst the Greatest Female Stars of All Time.
Grace with Cary Grant
If you know me I have most likely made you watch this movie
The federal Pet Safety and Protection Act would prohibit Class B Dealers and unlicensed individuals from selling dogs and cats to research laboratories.
Class B Dealers are people who collect dogs and cats to sell to the research industry. They sometimes obtain their animals through illegal or unethical means, such as by responding to “free to good home” ads in newspapers, falsifying records to keep the true origins of the animals unknown and stealing pets kept outside in yards. They also buy animals in bulk from “bunchers,” whose methods are even more questionable.
Eliminating Class B Dealers will also take away the profit motive of bunchers, providing a much-needed safety net to ensure beloved pets are not stolen or acquired under false pretenses and sold to facilities that test on animals.
The wonderful news for the Gay community is Gay marriage is legal here in Maine!The bad news is it may be taken away. I love my Gay and Lesbian friends and they are people the same as you and I so why can’t they be able to marry as we can? Being Gay does not make you an Alien or a Sinner or weird. It just is.
In Leviticus in the Bible is says “If a man lay with a man the same as he lay with a woman they shall both shall be stoned to death.” What kind of people think like that? Primitive people. If there was a God he would not believe that unless he is sick and twisted. But Not to worry There is No Scientific Evidence of any kind of God.
This is from: http://gay.americablog.com
Leader of anti-marriage campaign admits misleading people of Maine
But, in an interview tonight on Maine Public Broadcasting Network, Mutty not only admitted that, contrary to what his campaign has been alleging, there won’t be a mandate to teach same-sex marriage in schools, he went further. Mutty admitted that his side has misled the people of Maine:
“We’ve never said that schools will be mandated- or, actually, perhaps we did in one ad, or certainly led people to believe that, inadvertently,” says Yes on 1’s Chairman Marc Mutty.
“Inadvertently.” Wink, wink.
Mutty and his boss, Bishop Malone, have done a disservice to the people of Maine. In the interview, Mutty had the audacity to blame the lie on “verbal short cuts” in his side’s 30-second ads. Those ads and the “verbal short cuts” were created by Mutty’s very high-powered consultants, Schubert-Flint, the very same firm that created the disgusting ads for the Yes on Prop. 8 side in California. So, just how inadvertent do you really think the lies were?
That strategy worked in California. It’s not working in Maine.UniteTheFight has the audio. Definitely worth a listen.
Maine’s Catholic Church donations to anti-gay campaign top $550,000
Today, we have more evidence of just how much the Catholic Church, led by Bishop Richard Malone, is funding the anti-gay campaign in Maine, meaning the Bishop is funding the lies. The campaign director for the anti-gay campaign in Maine, Marc Mutty, recently admitted that his side has been misleading the people of Maine. (Mutty is actually an employee of the Catholic Diocese on Maine, who is on leave to run the campaign.) Here’s the latest, via AP:
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland has given another $152,600 to the group that’s trying to overturn Maine’s gay-marriage law.
A spokeswoman said the new contributions were transferred from a “rainy day” fund to the Stand for Marriage Maine political action committee.
That brings total Roman Catholic contributions to more than $550,000. That includes more than $180,000 from the Diocese of Portland, $141,300 from individual parishioners in Maine and $214,000 from other dioceses and bishops across the U.S.
This is shocking. The Diocese of Maine is shutting down parishes. The Bishop couldn’t use his “rainy day” fund for that? And, who the hell knew the Bishop had a “rainy day” fund? This anti-gay effort is clearly more important to the Bishop.
The Catholic Diocese of Maine is to Yes on 1 as the Mormons were to Yes on Prop. 8.
I can’t wait to tell this news to my mother. She is not going to be happy. Many, many Catholics in Maine won’t be happy.
[NOM] has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Bangor alleging that Maine’s financial reporting requirements are unconstitutional. The lawsuit seeks a court injunction prohibiting the state from enforcing a law that NOM officials claim is being used to harass and intimidate opponents of gay marriage.
“The reporting requirements become onerous and burdensome, especially when you are working in several states, and are an infringement of free speech,” said Brian Brown, NOM’s executive director.
…
Brown and NOM’s attorneys contend the organization did not violate Maine’s rules because they were soliciting donations for the general fight to protect “traditional marriage,” not for the Maine campaign in particular.
Brown argued in an interview Thursday that the reporting requirements — which include registering as a ballot question committee, appointing a treasurer and keeping detailed records for four years — are an undue burden. He also described Maine’s law as legally unclear and “patently unconstitutional” because it prohibited or discouraged free speech in the form of advocacy on one side of an issue.
As Mike Tidmus reported, one of the complaints made by APIA in the filing [PDF] is that it wants to run two ads on Maine television, but says they are “chilled from doing so, however, by the prospect of having to register as a BQC and meet the reporting and other requirements of sections 1056-B and 1059.”
They even produced transcripts of the two unbelievable ads they want to run – the first is entitled “Bigot”:
Girl: Mommy, are you a bigot?
Mother: What?
Girl: At school, we learned that people who are against gay marriage are bigots.
Mother: No, dear. I believe that homosexuals should be treated fairly–but I also believe that marriage should be just for one man and one woman. That doesn’t make me a bigot.
Girl: What about Reverend Jones and Father Diego? Are they bigots?
Mother: Did you learn that at school too?
Girl nods
VO: Think that gay marriage won’t affect your family? Think again.
Vote Yes Graphic
And the second ad, which is amazingly even worse, is entitled “The New Curriculum”:
School Administrator (talking to an off-camera mic/reporter–as he talks, we see images of teachers in classrooms reading from blurred-out books, GLSEN-style posters, etc.): No, we’re very proud of the new curriculum. It’s all about teaching kids to embrace different lifestyles and explore their own sexuality.
Switching from images of sex ed classrooms to little boy on a bench in a darkened school hallway. We can see an adult male (not his face, we’re looking from the perspective of the child and the view never includes his head) come out of an office, take the boy’s hand, lead him into the office, and close the door. Freeze on the closed-door, which has a sign that says, “Counseling Session: Do Not Disturb”
Reporter (VO) : Yes, but is it appropriate for kindergartener to be receiving counseling about whether they might be gay?
School Admin (VO): Sure, we’ve had a few complaints, but there’s not much parents can do. It’s the law, after all.
VO: Think gay marriage won’t affect your family? Think again.
Vote Yes Graphic
People I am in a loving wonderful straight relationship of many years and I care about this issue so you why don’t you? People deserve rights. I am not married. I am engaged. Have been many years. I will get married to my wonderful John when all gay & Lesbian people in the US can get married.
I love this Picture. I stole it from a friend.
I would love to hear people thoughts so comment away.
Very Soon I will be kicking off my Interview series. But be patient I am a bit behind trying to interview 22 people at the moment. It’s great!
I changed the blog look. Better right?
I am becoming more and more obsessed with visual arts and My friend Gage and I have some projects we plan to make up as we go along because we are spontaneous! Gage is very talented animator, photographer and much more. So you will be seeing lots of his great works coming up. You might remember him from this post: http://amandainmaine.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/visual-arts/ ( He is the Young man in the suit of course).
Any art by Gage I post you may not reproduce without his permission. Are we clear on this? Good.
Next bit of biz.
*Hulu will start to Charge in 2010. Yes I know it is a bummer and dumb but we will see what happens with that. Maybe it wont happen at all.
*Now here is a article from The New York Times I thought was very interesting please read the whole thing.
Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.
The question has been a contentious one among researchers. Proponents have argued that prayer is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease, and that it may relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood. Skeptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and that it presupposes supernatural intervention, putting it by definition beyond the reach of science.
At least 10 studies of the effects of prayer have been carried out in the last six years, with mixed results. The new study was intended to overcome flaws in the earlier investigations. The report was scheduled to appear in The American Heart Journal next week, but the journal’s publisher released it online yesterday.
In a hurriedly convened news conference, the study’s authors, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer. But the results, they said, raised questions about how and whether patients should be told that prayers were being offered for them.
“One conclusion from this is that the role of awareness of prayer should be studied further,” said Dr. Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and a co-author of the study.
Other experts said the study underscored the question of whether prayer was an appropriate subject for scientific study.
“The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion,” said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine.”
The study cost $2.4 million, and most of the money came from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research into spirituality. The government has spent more than $2.3 million on prayer research since 2000.
Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a co-author of the report, said the study said nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members and friends.
Working in a large medical center like Mayo, Mr. Marek said, “You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.”
In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation around a clogged vein or artery.
The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.
The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul’s Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients’ first names and the first initials of their last names.
The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were instructed to include the phrase, “for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.”
Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.
In another of the study’s findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers’ prayers also may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.
“It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?” Dr. Bethea said.
The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group — 18 percent — suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers. In their report, the researchers suggested that this finding might also be a result of chance.
One reason the study was so widely anticipated was that it was led by Dr. Benson, who in his work has emphasized the soothing power of personal prayer and meditation.
At least one earlier study found lower complication rates in patients who received intercessory prayers; others found no difference. A 1997 study at the University of New Mexico, involving 40 alcoholics in rehabilitation, found that the men and women who knew they were being prayed for actually fared worse.
The new study was rigorously designed to avoid problems like the ones that came up in the earlier studies. But experts said the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.
Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry’s mission.
“A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,” Mr. Barth said, “but we’ve been praying a long time and we’ve seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.” ( Published: March 31, 2006 )
*Now A must see Video: KarmaKoma By Massive Attack. This video blew my mind it is so unique and a tad creepy. I love the music of Massive Attack as well.
The discovery means there are now about 400 known planets outside our solar system.
Wired says that several of the 32 newly discovered planets “qualify as ’super-Earths,’ meaning they have a mass only a few times that of our planet and could potentially harbor Earth-like environments.”
Nature.com says “the planets may not be the biggest, fattest, smallest or Earthiest, but they show that the chances of us finding Earth-like planets are pretty high.”
I live inside my blog now. It's very nice in here and no one judges you for thinking or being creative in a unusual way. Thank you WordPress 1 week ago
This week’s venture kicks of with a number of strange entity encounters before we return to the topic of exopolitics, and UFO disclosure from the White House, rumored to be due this month. Things then take a rather morbid turn as we discus recent hauntings of morgues, the best ways to die in space, and then [...]Episode 210 – Mysterious Universe […]
For Halloween Ben and Aaron scared up a haunting edition of Mysterious Universe, perfect to hide under the covers with. Lest we get too cozy, however, don’t forget that terror can also come from other realms including the stars. Halloween is, of course, the anniversary (71st this year) of the 1938 Mercury Theater radio broadcast [...]Journalist’ […]
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency has just released pictures that show a dark spot that may well be a portal leading to a huge lava-made cave that could one day serve as an underground moonbase for astronauts. That is if they aren’t already occupied. The story reminded me of a brief interview I did about [...]Anomalist Extraordinaire Mac Tonni […]
We’ve got quite a treat in store for you this week in the form of a huge two hour Halloween Special. In the first hour Aaron and I take our chances against an ancient Jewish Curse as Jason Haxton returns to tell his adventures as keeper of this strange artifact. Be warned that strange things [...]Episode 209 – Mysterious Universe is a post from: […]
Just a quick post to let you know that this week’s special episode will be released on Halloween. That is if our interview with the Dibbuk box keeper, Jason Haxton, didn’t leave us cursed yet again. Aaron pointed out to me yesterday that as the interview started we experienced the heaviest October rainfall in Sydney [...]MU Halloween News is a po […]
If you’re wanting to really enjoy some melancholia, and you’re a hopeless romantic like myself, it’s hard to beat “Ne Me Quitte Pas” by the Flemish/Belgian/French Jacques Brel. It’s the number one song on my self-pity list. My friend Hayley reminded me of the song recently on Facebook. I hadn’t realized how awful the […]
I’m having a nice lazy sleepy day today. I worked really hard yesterday, and so the house is all straightened up and very pleasant. Yesterday, I had the extra bonus of having our rugs professionally cleaned and disinfected (if you live in the Atlanta area, I highly recommend them). Spent a [...]
For Hallowe’en, that is. I had a heck of a time changing the theme and updating some plugins, but all is well now. We’ve got a scary creature set up at the door. The kid’s costume is set. For those that don’t celebrate Hallowe’en, I have my own plans (muah-haahahahaha). It’s been kind of strange and upsetting [...]
Hello there!So I'm new to this and this is really just a test that i'm doing it correct :o) I started this blog so I could get my business name out there and to connect with my friends and family! I'm looking forward to doing this and keeping everyone up to date with my progress.XOXOJessica
Although it is easy to give in to the anger mainly toward the religious right we must not let the anger sway us from our mission. My gay friends should be able to marry as I can and I am shocked and angry at the results.
I love Milla and Cate. SO this is my weird way of showing it. 
