Over the last couple of years, I’ve been researching off and on a right wing evangelical group that has very successfully kept its cover for the most part. When I first discovered them, even my friend Mel White, who is considered an expert of anti-gay groups wasn’t familiar with them. I recall sending him the information I’d uncovered and asked him if he were familiar with them and he said he wasn’t. The Group is known as “The Family.” Since then, there have been a number of articles written about them, but it always seemed to me that they were much more powerful than anyone suspected.

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Randi Reitan is a tireless advocate for justice for LGBT people and she’s up to it again! Target recently made a $150,000 contribution a group working to elect anti-gay candidate Tom Emmer in Minnesota, the Reitan’s home state. In response, Randi went to Target to return items she purchased and announce her boycott of the company. Her simple actions have gone viral as countless others join the Target boycott. Randi is the mother to Jake, founder of the Equality Ride and numerous other Soulforce campaigns. Now, Jake is urging folks to take the money they would have spent at Target and donate it to OutFront Minnesota which is working to match Target’s donation which will go toward defeating anti-LGBT candidates like Tom Emmer.

If you decide to not shop at Target, Brandon Lacy Campos offers this suggestion:

If you choose to boycott target personally, use the model of UpTake.org, record your direct action and make it available widely on the web with a cogent discussion of why you are choosing to shop elsewhere.

We encourage you to read his post on Why Not to Boycott Target for a thorough intersectional analysis as well as additional proposals for how to target the cause. His article on Working Class and Working Class Queers vs Target Boycotters offers additional perspective and calls for collaboration to create justice for LGBT people and our allies.

While there has been a great deal of coverage regarding the situation of the couple in Malawi, almost nothing has been addressed to the situation that this couple does not fit the label of gay couple.  The following two articles bring a new understanding of the couple and what they face.  We have not seen anything written concerning this previously.  Our thanks to to Jim Burroway for the research involved as well as his capacity to allow people to self-identify as they wish and the refusal to impose our own cultural understandings on others.

“The Malawi Couple: Gay or Transgender? Or Something Else?”
from Box Turtle Bulletin

“Once again the ‘T’ in LGBT is silenced”
from Guardian UK

WAPT 16 writes about the Equality Ride’s visit to Mississippi College

Administrators at Mississippi College met with members of Soul Force [sic] for the first time Wednesday.

Soul Force, a national gay rights group that travels the country, has visited MC for three years in a row to protest school policies they said discriminate against gay college students. MC does not specifically ban homosexuality, but the student handbook says it will not be tolerated on campus.

Jason Connor [sic] organized the stop at Mississippi College.

“Mississippi College identifies as a Christian university and one of the things that we are trying to talk about is that being gay and being Christian are not mutually exclusive,” Connor said.

Soul force first visited in MC in 2007

Read the rest of the article, view a video, on WAPT 16

One of my great passions is the idea of Simple Living. Recently, a friend asked me,

“What does simple living have to do with nonviolence.”

For me, the answer lies in the fact that we North Americans are 12% of the world’s population consuming more than 60% of the world’s resources; leaving the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with only 3.2 percent of the remaining resources.

When I was growing up, we used to talk about bringing the rest of the world up to the American standard of living. But now we understand that with this chasm between those who have and those who have not, this goal is not a possibility. And neither is peace as long as that chasm continues. Peace is only sustainable in a world where justice prevails. And as long as the injustice of gross economic disparity continues to exist, so will war.

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