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WASHINGTON, D.C., November 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – President Obama says he backs "The Equality Act," which would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "Upon that review it is now clear that the administration strongly supports the Equality Act,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced on Tuesday. “That bill is historic legislation that would advance the cause of equality for millions of Americans. “We look forward to working with Congress to ensure that the legislative process produces a result that balances both the bedrock principles of civil rights...with the religious liberty that we hold...

An employee of a Catholic church in the Chicago Archdiocese has filed a complaint saying he was fired after he got married to his male partner, his lawyers said Thursday.Sandor Demkovich was the music director at St. Andrew the Apostle Parish in Calumet City until last year, when he was fired for marrying his male partner, according to a complaint filed Sept. 30 with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Illinois Department of Human Rights against the archdiocese.The case is similar to that of a music director at another church, Holy Family Catholic Community in Inverness, who said...

Analysis Nov. 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - A Dominican friar, Fr. Adriano Oliva, has celebrated the 800th anniversary of his religious order with a book about “the Church, the divorced and remarried, and homosexual couples.” Amours (“Loves”) is a study of St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love and aims to show that the “Angelic Doctor” recognized the “natural” character of homosexuality. In the wake of the Synod on the family, Oliva pleads for new ways of welcoming divorced and remarried and homosexual couples into the Church and of recognizing their unions in civil law. His editor, the “editions du Cerf” publishing...

ABC reportedly won't allow two men to dance as a couple together on "Dancing with the Stars." An openly gay singer, Who Is Fancy (yes, that is what he calls himself), is set to perform his new song, "Boys Like You," with Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor on the reality competition show's November 23 episode. The song is about a man falling in love with another man, so the singer's choreographer wanted to have two men dancing with each other in the performance. But TMZ reported that ABC wasn't having it. According to the site's sources, a "DWTS" producer responded...

John Murphy was on a conference call in April when he got a strange message.A veteran manager of nonprofit groups, the 63-year-old was busy settling into his new job as executive director at St. Francis Home, an assisted living facility affiliated with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond. “You’ll be getting a visit,” he was told. And moments later, a man and woman dressed in business attire were standing in the doorway.They got right to the point: “We understand that you are in a same-sex marriage,” he recalls them saying. “That is antithetical to the church’s teachings and renders you...

Nov. 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - A Dominican friar, Fr. Adriano Oliva, has celebrated the 800th anniversary of his religious order with a book about "the Church, the divorced and remarried, and homosexual couples." Amours ("Loves") is a study of St Thomas Aquinas' definition of love and aims to show that the "Angelic Doctor" recognized the 'natural" character of homosexuality. In the wake of the Synod on the family, Oliva pleads for new ways of welcoming divorced and remarried and homosexual couples into the Church and of recognizing their unions in civil law. His editor, the "editions du Cerf" publishing house,...

Jackie Biskupski, the openly gay mayor-elect of Salt Lake City, isn't happy that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a group better known as the Mormons, clarified its stance on its membership requirements. Under policies disclosed last week, the LDS Church won't accept as members or missionaries children of same-sex couples. She now wants a meeting with church leaders to discuss "policies." The move evoked echoes of Houston's Mayor Annise Parker who, in a two-year battle over a human rights bill, at one point subpoenaed sermons from local pastors opposed to the measure and sought a public vote....

The White House is endorsing pro-gay legislation that would prohibit discrimination toward the LGBT clique.  Known as the Equality Act, the bill would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extending protection to those in the LGBT community from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. At Tuesday's White House press briefing, press secretary Josh Earnest stated that the Obama administration "strongly supports" the act. "That bill is historic legislation that would advance the cause of equality for millions of Americans," Earnest said, "and we certainly are pleased with the many legislators in Congress that have stepped forward to try...

Those of us who oppose the expansion of governmental controls often get the retort, "You’re just using a slippery slope argument; the bad consequences you foresee are extremely unlikely to happen." Ah, but predicted bad consequences often do happen. As evidence, I offer the following instance. In 2013, a student in Palatine Township High School (Illinois) complained about sexual discrimination to the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The allegedly illegal "discrimination" suffered was because the school refused to allow the student, a male who “identifies” as a female, to use the girls' locker room. The applicable...

April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce of Carbon County, Utah said the baby they've raised for the last three months is to be removed from their home and sent to heterosexual foster parents because a judge ruled the baby would be better off.According to a KUTV report on Wednesday, Judge Scott Johansen ordered the baby removed from their house in seven days.(video at link)Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services approved the women as foster parents earlier this year after passing home inspections, background checks and interviews.The couple says the judge told them there was a lot of research that indicated children who...

Actress Jennifer Lawrence says she's "embarassed" that she grew up in the same state as Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Lawrence, who has been on a crusade on Hollywood's gender pay gap, brought up the subject in an interview with Vogue published Wednesday night. According to interviewer Jonathan Van Meter, the interview took place the day after Davis got out of jail, and Lawrence brought her up because she views Davis as the "lady who makes me embarrassed to be from Kentucky." "Don't even say her name...

In a new Vogue feature, Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence described the reason behind her political affiliation, including why she doesn't support the Republican Party. And the Hunger Games star's logic is simple. "I was raised a Republican, but I just can't imagine supporting a party that doesn't support women's basic rights," Lawrence told Vogue. Many of the Republican presidential hopefuls have identified as pro-life. Some have advocated for defunding Planned Parenthood, which offers reproductive health services to women. "It's 2015 and gay people can get married and we think that we've come so far, so, yay! But have we?...

Actual Title:President Obama has made history by becoming the first sitting U.S. president to pose for the cover of an LGBT magazine. Obama is on the cover of Out magazine’s latest Out 100 issue as the publication’s “Ally of the Year.” “The 44th President of the United States is our Ally of the Year—a president who came to office on a wave of euphoria, appeared to lose momentum halfway through, and has since rallied, helping us secure marriage equality, among other landmark initiatives that are transforming our place in America,” the editors of Out wrote in an article accompanying the...

A Utah judge removed a foster child from a lesbian couple, saying the 1-year-old girl would be better off with a heterosexual couple.

Events of recent memory have left my head spinning in disbelief—“Caitlyn,” same-sex so-called “marriage,” three women “marrying” in South America, and, yes, “gay Catholics” and “chaste gay couples.” With me, you may wonder how all this has emerged in a short few decades of social upheaval. I may have an answer: Society has constructed an unreal cultural landscape in which things that are not sexuality are passed off as sexuality. Even a majority of Catholics are, perhaps unwittingly, swallowing this unreality, hook, line, and sinker.The fabric of this false landscape is language—language that frames everyone and everything in a...

It did not take long for marriage revisionism to show its hostility to the relationship among children, mothers, and fathers. Just a few months after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that all states must eliminate from their legal definition of marriage the essential involvement of man and woman, conflicts between this redefinition and the fundamental rights of children to be connected to both father and mother are already making their way through the courts.In these conflicts, children’s rights might seem to enjoy an advantage of priority. Even states that redefined marriage several years ago have left in...

San Diego State University has axed its longtime tradition of naming a homecoming "king" and "queen," and this year will go with the gender-neutral term "royals," the Daily Aztec campus newspaper reports. As recently as last year SDSU named a homecoming "king" and "queen" during its annual football game, according to the university’s website. But this Saturday when the Aztecs take on the University of Wyoming Cowboys, the Royal Court will end up with the "final two Royals," the website adds. It’s unclear if those final two "royals" will be one male and one female, or some other iteration of...

Former President George H.W. Bush has moderated his views on same-sex marriage since seeking the White House, according to a new biography. Bush said in his audio diary before his 1988 presidential campaign that Americans "didn't want same-sex marriage codified," according to The New York Times. But after he served as an official witness at a 2013 same-sex wedding, he sent his biographer, Jon Meacham, a note to clarify that his views had changed....

The new chairman of New York City’s iconic Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, who has proposed eliminating the honoring of Saint Patrick from the parade’s bylaws, is “a director” of a foundation that financially supports medical experiments that use fetal tissue harvested from abortions and acquired for a fee from a company at the heart of the Planned Parenthood video scandal that has horrified the nation.Dr. John Lahey, who took control of the parade’s board of directors in July, called a meeting for Oct. 29 with agenda points designed to secularize the traditional celebration of Irish Catholic heritage.Matthew Hennessey, writing in...

Robert Oscar Lopez, a tenured English professor at California State University-Northridge, is on the verge of being suspended without pay, ostensibly due to a conference he organized a year ago. In fact, I believe this is not the real reason why this man of Puerto Rican and Philippine heritage, who knows six modern languages as well as Latin and Greek, is being hounded out of his job. Lopez’s parents divorced when he was a toddler. His mother formed an intimate relationship with another woman. His father disappeared from his life for a long time. Lopez believes that these events were...